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Episode 523 - Gabriel-Ernest & The Music on the Hill (Patreon)

Published:
2020-11-16 17:00:07
Edited:
2024-12-12 19:00:36
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

Down the hatch with more Saki - it's Gabriel-Ernest and The Music on the Hill!

Special thanks to our Dublin-Irish reader Conor MacNamara!

Next up: The Soul of Laploshka and The Open Window 

Comments

Eye_Diddle_Dogz

Thanks again for the chance to read; after years of listening it was certainly strange hearing my own garbled voice on the show. On to more Saki!

Jennifer DeFord

I'm so glad to hear you guys cover what was probably the first werewolf story I ever read. I was about 9 when I stumbled upon "Gabriel-Ernest," and I was certain at the time that no story could be more horrifying. (The next year I finally got my hands on some Stephen King—"The Cat From Hell"—and immediately revised *that* opinion.) I picked it up again several years later and was completely shocked to realize it was funny. I guess fourth-grade me didn't realize you could have both of those things going on in one story.

Brian J

Willie Nelson said it best, "My Heroes Have Always Been Werewolves." I first read Gabriel-Ernest in an anthology when I was maybe 8 years old, and the sexual subtext would have gone completely over my head if not for the freaky two-page illustration that was included, featuring an entirely androgynous, feral-eyed youth covered in a few sheets of newspaper, with a seductive smile on his embellished lips. It always gave me an uneasy feeling, like I didn't need my mom to see that and ask what kind of trash I was reading! I don't think it's much of a stretch to read G-E as a kind of metaphor for Saki's own sexuality, especially considering those times. This Pan figure - free, wild, lithe, letting it all hang out, at the scandalous age of 16-ish, lurking around the untamed places that the fussy, flustered Van Cheele imagines to be so under control? What if this predator should break free? There is a beast in your woods, indeed.

DJW

Been hoping to hear you guys cover these two stories for a long time so really glad you’re enjoying Saki - Music on the Hill really catches a feeling I’ve had when out walking in the moors that sometimes regardless of personal belief there something there you don’t wanna get on the bad side of while out there

Pam Winkler

In Music on the Hill, it’s Dead Mortimer’s mom who says the farm has an allure for him.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

There's probably a delightful pastiche in the making: The Importance of Being Gabriel-Ernest. Foreshadowing at Half Moon Street. Deadly doings under assumed names in the countryside. A bloody and clawed handbag produced as all wonder whatever happened to the child abandoned at Victoria Station. Pithy homoerotic witticisms bandied about in gardens... Somebody call Blumhouse!

Forrest Rush

As I probably didn’t make clear last week, I do love me some Saki, the Munroe variety not the rotten rice sluice as covered last time. Gabriel Ernest is probably my favorite. I would have to go along with what other commentators have said about not picking up on anything sexual when I first read this story around the age of 9 or 10, but as a teen, and seeing the various illustrations that would accompany such early 20th century works, yeah I definitely did. It goes without saying that Saki was making his own coded reference to homosexuality with the werewolf’s surname connecting to Wilde’s The importance of Being Earnest. Was more intended by that? I don’t think so, though there are plenty of dissertations arguing just that. It’s just Munroe having fun with words as he so often does. Did his audience of the time get it? Considering within a decade or two Disney would begin vomiting out innumerable coded gay characters that most would remain clueless to until reddit came along, I’d have to say no they didn’t or rather they remained willfully unclued. I know for the younger folks today, gay, straight and all along the beautiful rainbow, it all seems rather convoluted, but Saki’s world, which really hadn’t changed that much even by the 70’s and 80’s was one where you could be homosexual as long as you didn’t “act,” you could say and do the most outrageous thinks as long as you didn’t talk about rights and organize a pride march (see Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace, Rock Hudson and every male hairdresser in every southern and midwestern small town). These were the rules and if we abided, we lived more and less peacefully. Of course, many of us couldn’t stay in those closets and broke free, something Saki really couldn’t do in his time. But he had other avenues of expression. On to less depressing stuff, I hope you guys are able to locate the lost Van Cheele’s Further Oblivious Encounters with the Obvious Chapter 1. Van Cheele is strolling the countryside when he is accosted by a rather bedraggled fellow. BF: BRAINS! VC.: I do say sir, you seem most discombobulated. One must take better care of one’s toilet. Please take my handkerchief and cover that gapping hole in your chest. No one wishes to be confronted with another’s inners while taking their Sunday constitution. BF: BRAINS! Chapter 2. Van Cheele invites a charming Romanian fellow to dinner. VC: So Count how are you enjoying your stay. I do apologise for the rather dreary weather we are having of late. It was so sunny and bright just a day before your arrival. CD Ahh ze darkness ze storm, she frees the blood, ze blood nourishes us all. VC. Yes yes, most interesting. Shall we dine? CD: OH yes, ve shall. VC. Now, now my good sir. I don’t wish to be impolite but your intentions seem most improper. I think there is a pub in the village where the fellows are more into that kind of thing.

Sanjay Mathew

A were-otter would be pretty horrifying. Unlike wolves, otters are actually extremely vicious. Here in Singapore due to a lot of our canals getting makeovers to have natural river-like banks instead of concrete walls we've had an otter population boom and different clans have bloody turf wars. Also did anyone else notice an odd preponderance of Dutch names? Mrs De Roop in Sredni Vashtar and Van Cheele this week.

Darth Pseudonym

A millrace is not, as you said, for carrying waste away from the mill, though humans will throw garbage into any nearby body of water if you give them half a chance. The intended purpose of a millrace is to accelerate water from a stream in order to turn a water wheel, which can power a variety of industrial uses, from grinding flour to rolling steel. There are many designs for a millrace, some dating back as far as 300 BC, but generally it involves using a dam or weir and a narrow channel or sluice to convert a relatively slow moving stream into a very fast stream for a short distance, which makes it easier to extract power from the water. Millraces can be surprisingly dangerous. While the stream is otherwise safe, the millrace itself is violently fast water in a narrow space full of machinery, so it's easy to get injured in you fall in. Worse, the dam and the tailrace -- where the fast mill water pours back into the slow stream -- can both produce a number of vortex effects that can hold a victim underwater for many minutes with no real hope of escape.

Pam Winkler

There is a six foot long taxidermy otter specimen in Ursula Vernon’s book The Hollow Places, under her T. Kingfisher pen name. She based the story on The Willows, and it’s fantastic.

Steve

Perhaps Chris is the thing on the moor we've all been warned about.

Shana Carter

I wondered if "Gabriel-Ernest" *were* "nice, suitable names" for a werewolf, so I looked them up. "Gabriel," derived from the Hebrew "Gavri'el," which means "God Is My Strength", is the name of the archangel who informs the Virgin Mary of the impending birth of Jesus Christ and is often identified as the figure whose trumpet blast will signal the resurrection of the dead and the return of the messiah, though there's no explicit textural basis for assigning him the latter role. "Ernest," meanwhile, comes from the Germanic "eornost," meaning "serious". Given the title character's sly humor and fondness for the flesh of children, I think we can safely say the choice of name was highly ironic.

Stacy Schumacher

The babies/cats with old man faces crack me up. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the funniest bits of What We Do In The Shadows (the cat with Vlad the Poker's face) was inspired by those. Hilarious and horrific in equal measure. I suspect the artist couldn't get either a cat or baby to sit for the painting and just shrugged, "who's gonna notice?"

Robert D.

Van Cheele’s total obliviousness to the comments about eating children made me think about him like a very polite upper class guy, ignoring the strangeness to avoid any risk of embarrassment. To be fair I’ve med lots of people like that at work, and I’ve sometimes thought about how strangely I could behave before anyone saying something...

Rafe Ball

Yeah, Van Cheele is pretty clueless - even if the boy *had* said that was his name, I still don't think he would have got it! "What's your name, boy?" "W.E. Rewolf". Ah, of the New Hampshire Rewolfs! I was reassured, that was a most reputable family - indeed, I had summered with George Rewolf, Sr. in his house at the Hamptons a couple of years ago.

longer tramcars

Long time listener, ‘phobic of forums’ first time poster. Guys, 2020 has been hard, but it has given me the opportunity to really contemplate what little things bring me joy. I think I found my bliss. If you had asked me 5 years ago, a year ago, a month ago, or even a couple of days ago, I don’t think I would have been able to tell you that it is Chad spinning innovative and confusing business propositions for petting zoos while Chris uncontrollably giggles. I would listen to an hour of just that; who knew... Thank you for helping a science nerd, who is embarrassingly unread and uneducated in most literary circles, navigate the world of strange fiction. While I appreciate your primary modus operandi, I will never turn down the occasional Manimal review ep and am still secretly awaiting a Golden Girls fancast.

Tomas Rawlings

Great show. What this story Gabriel-Ernest showed is that what werewolves should do is hangout with werewolves obsessive fans and that way nobody would ever believe the werewolves obsessive fans that they are real. So when you text and say, "Hey, Jane is a werewolf, run!" People would be like, man that dude is a werewolves obsessive and ignore them.

Mark Saunders

Seeing The Open Window in the up next gives me high school flashbacks. My introduction to Saki was having to write an essay on that story for an English final in junior high. Those bad memories made me hesitate a bit when I heard you were doing a month on Saki. But, the first four stories were so good that I might have to accept that I was wrong and open that window again.

Peter Larsen

Chad, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost” and “you look like you’ve seen a wolf” are related. They Both come from the older saying “you look like you’ve seen the ghost of a werewolf,” which was in common usage during the early modern period. After the American Revolution, the phrase was slowly shortened on each side of the Atlantic. Since the UK has no wolves but is chock full of ghosts, and the US the opposite, each nation went with the imaginary threat. A few people hung on to “you look like you’ve seen a were,” but that just made them sound like they thought you were shocked by dams, weirs, and other water control projects, which we can all agree is silly. Strange, but true! (If “true” is taken to include “complete fabrication,” which is generally the case these days in certain public circles.)

Evan

As a gay guy stuck at home for my junior year of Uni, I would love a sexy wolf boi to come and sweep me off my feet for a week (hell, he might even be immune to COVID) so I might need to borrow your “sexy-radar” Chris 😂. The second story I honestly enjoyed a bit more though. Pan as like an archetypical character is one of my favorite things in fiction. I almost think of it along the lines of a Jungian archetype, tho I don’t think he officially is one, some kind of “old wild man” who shows humanity how far they’re strayed. He’s scary (if and when he is) because he dredges up parts of our past that we’ve supposedly evolved beyond. Wild revel, perverse desire, all that jazz has been cut out of our lives on a societal level, and it poses a kind of deep, existential threat to the communities we’ve built and the idea of human civilization as a whole because it’s still somewhere in us, and with the right pushes and prods from an old goat with a flute (and maybe a few antlers to the heart for the more unwilling) we could very easily revert to that carnal, wild state. Idk, maybe I should switch to a lit degree and just write essays on him, but I find it fascinating.

Erik Sieurin

Oooh! Remember this one (Gabriel-Ernst!) from an anthology when I was a kid!

Ben Gilbert

A werewolf joke: Knock knock. Who’s there? Ah. Ah who? Werewolves of London!

Chumka

What do you call a wolf that meditates?

Chumka

... Aware Wolf