EDITORIAL & NEWS

Is Seeing Believing?

by Margie Deck & Nancy Holder

On page 10 of our story, Hardcastle experiences his first close encounter with the Terror—and it is weird and inconclusive. Having fallen asleep waiting for his matches to dry in his armpit, he is awakened by a sound “very distinct from the human voice.” He believes it to be the tread of a gigantic beast; by its swift movements he deduces that it can see in the dark—bad news for a man stuck in utter darkness on a boulder above a rushing stream. But is this deduction accurate?

According to horror author Susan Barker, the American art philosopher Noël Carroll is correct is his assessment that a “conventional horror story usually has a ‘complex discovery plot,’ structured as follows: onset (of the monster), discovery, confirmation, and confrontation” (“Susan Barker on Terror and the Power of Ambiguity” Literary Hub, quoting The Philosophy of Horror Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, 1990). As with the Hero’s Journey, which we discussed in our commentary on page 6, “The Terror of Blue John Gap” follows this template. Poor Hardcastle has now confirmed that there is indeed something living in the caverns. And regarding Barker’s favorite aspect of horror, ambiguity, this discovery is full of ambiguity—which is one of the key reasons this story works so well.

The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (Rachel Ablow, editor, University of Michigan, 2010) posits that many Victorian readers enjoyed reading to feel, as opposed to learn or to reason. They sought out “what it feels like to hold a belief,” rather than choosing to believe something new. We might call this the willing suspension of disbelief. Another term is “cultivated bias,” which Doyle often displays: what it means to be a British man of a specific class; what makes someone or something the Other. Whether or not an adversary that dwells in darkness can see. Hardcastle’s assumption that it does see can neither be proved nor disproved. Though we will later observe the Terror on full display, the question, “Does it see Hardcastle?” will never be answered.

We now know that animals can use senses other than eyes to see. Scientific American recently published two fascinating articles about how animals use different parts of their bodies to see better than humans in the dark. For example, the brains of nocturnal sweat bees process visual information in ways other than the brains of humans; hawkmoths and frogs see vivid colors at night, and frogs and beetles literally navigate by starlight. Scientists have also learned that light-reactive proteins covering hydra tentacles and sea urchin feet transform the body parts or entire bodies of these animals into compound eyes. (Many essays about discoveries such as these can be found in Ed Wong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Random House, 2022.) These sensory “deviations” from our bias about eyesight (emphasis ours) reveal multitudes of different Umwelten, or perceptual worlds, that different creatures inhabit. Armed with this new information, and lacking a concrete answer in the story, readers can imagine the Terror honing in on its prey, be it lamb or Englishman, in frightening and novel ways.

In our opinion, this is one of the reasons Doyle’s story enthralls contemporary readers like us—though appearing to rely on reason and fact, the physical makeup of Terror is never concretely “known.” Seeing may be believing, but it is also guessing. And the more we readers know about the world, the more ambiguous—and unnerving—our guesses can be.

Copyright 2025 Margie Deck & Nancy Holder

COMMENTARY & CREATIVITY

Is Doyle’s Terror Terrifying?

by Kim Newman

At the height of his career as a writer, Arthur Conan Doyle hoped his historical novels would be remembered before his Sherlock Holmes stories. Later, when his interests changed, he trusted his championship of spiritualism would be his lasting legacy. It is a seeming paradox that the man famous for creating the most lasting and rational detective in literature—“no ghosts need apply,” Holmes snorts when presented with a case of possible vampirism—would devote himself to communication with the spirits of the dead, before we even get to the fairies. But that’s to misunderstand Doyle’s spiritualism—which he viewed as an unexplored science rather than a faith-based religion … to him, the afterlife was an unmapped terrain, just as the South American plateau of The Lost World was unexplored but accessible to hardy adventurers and scientists.

continued . . .

MEPHITIC: What is that smell?

by Karen Murdock

An unusual, and possibly even a controversial, word. The Oxford Languages Dictionary says:

me•phit•ic /məˈfidik/ adjective literary

adjective: mephitic (especially of a gas or vapor) foul-smelling; noxious.

continued . . .

Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Sheldon Goldfarb

Something is coming for Dr. Hardcastle. We won’t find out what it is for a few pages yet, but we can think of other writings of Arthur Conan Doyle with menacing creatures, and wonder if it might be something like one of those.

continued . . .

“The Terror of Blue John Gap” in Translation

by Peggy MacFarlane

The name Sherlock Holmes has been as good as ready money for generations now, so it is no surprise that the Holmes stories have been translated into over 100 languages. A relatively unknown Doylean work like “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” on the other hand, is a different matter. One does not expect to see translations of such a work as a matter of course, but they do exist and they stand testimony to the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s name can be a draw even without Holmes.

continued . . .

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YOU ARE HERE: 10

page 10 of the manuscript of The Terror of Blue John Gap

The autograph manuscript of “The Terror of Blue John Gap” reproduced above is courtesy of Dartmouth College Library, Rauner Special Collections, MS-93: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Transcription

most certainly have shouted, and vague as this sound was,

which had wakened me, it was certainly very distinct from the

human voice. I sat palpitating and hardly daring to

breathe. There it was again, and again. Now it had become

continuous. It was a tread — beyond all doubt it was the

heavy tread of some living creature. But what a tread it was!

It gave one the impression of enormous weight carried upon

sponge like feet which gave forth a muffled but ear-filling

sound. The darkness was as complete as ever but the tread was

regular and decisive. And it was coming beyond all question

in my direction.

My skin grew cold and my hair stood on end as I

listened to that steady and stealthy foot fall. There was some

creature there, and surely it was one who could see in the

dark. I crouched low on my rock and tried to blend myself

into it. The steps grew nearer still, then stopped, and presently

I was aware of a loud lapping and gurgling. The creature was

drinking at the stream. Then again there was silence broken by

a succession of long sniffs and snorts, of tremendous volume

and energy. Had it caught the scent of me. My own nostrils

were filled by a low fetid odour, mephitic and abominable.

Then I heard the steps again. They were on my side of the

stream now, but they did not long remain so. I heard the

splash as he returned, and then [deleted: they / inserted: the sound] died away into the

distance in the direction from which it had come.

For a long time I lay upon my rock too much

horrified to move. I thought of the sound which I had heard

coming from the depth of the cave, of Armitage's fears, of the

strange impression in the mud, and now came this final and

absolute proof that there was indeed some inconceivable

monster, something utterly un-English and dreadful, which

lurked in the hollow of the mountain. Of its nature or form I

could form no conception, save that it was both light-footed and

The full story as it was printed in The Strand is available at
The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia.