Life is pretty sweet in a small village, somewhere in the Swiss countryside of the 19th century. A family is celebrating the baptism of a new child with a veritable feast of lavishly described sweets, cakes, bread and roasted meat. Everyone is charmed and happy and full of joy at the proceedings…until one of the guests notices a strange, black-burnt post, incongruously a part of an otherwise pristine window-frame. What, wonders the guest, might be the deal with that strange, charred post? The old patriarch of the family hems and haws and finally starts in on the legend…a legend involving a cruel medieval lord, a population of desperate serfs and a woman who makes a deal with a red-hatted, gleaming-eyed stranger…a deal promising much-needed succor…in exchange for unbaptized infants.
And then, of course, there is The Black Spider.
This odd little fable was written in the 19th century, where it was received with only middling interest. As the Twentieth Century opened, and the world was rocked by catastrophe after catastrophe, it managed to find an ever larger audience…an audience that found it’s strange, perhaps even subconscious tensions and bizarre imagery and apocalyptic themes gruesomely familiar. It is, in effect, a tale of a society blasted to pieces by fear, by the machinations of a confident and charismatic leader eventually shown to be utterly out of their depth…and by the introduction of The Black Spider which is…yeeks. I don’t want to give TOO much away, as the surprise is part of the fun, but imagine if Grimm’s fairy tales got an adaptation by David Cronenberg, with a script by Kafka. There is some SERIOUSLY horrifying moments in the tale, and what started as a very conservative description of Christian-traditional good vs. Diabolic evil becomes…well, I don’t even know what to call it. Gotthelf was having some DARK dreams there, in those Swiss Alps.
Coming in at just over a hundred pages, THE BLACK SPIDER is a quick read, and a really interesting precursor to the 20th century genres of horror, fantasy and weird fiction. How befitting that the horror genre would creep up on us, ever so steadily, on so many gnarled, dark legs. Me like books.
Me Like Books 