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Episode 593 - Where Their Fire is not Quenched (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-30 20:42:20
Imported:
2026-06
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We're closing out our month in the attic with a sad ghost story: Where Their Fire is not Quenched by May Sinclair (link includes illustrations).

Special thanks to podcast champion reader Rachel Lackey of Rachel Watches Star Trek!

Next up: Child's Play by Villy Sorensen

Comments

Casey

This was such a great episode. Just as excellent a listen the second time, and Rachel is such a great narrator. 🤍

Jack Hughes

Never have I related to a protagonist as much as I have with Harriott. My jaunt through hell was shockingly similar too.

Steve

I think most of Proust's "stream of consciousness" writing was done before MS coined the term in 1918 as he died in 1922. And similarly for Joyce and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man which was published in 1916. It seems that there were many people employing the technique in different ways. And I love Mrs Dalloway, one of my favourite books.

Steve

May Sinclair was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and had an interest in spiritualism. Even if she wasn't particularly Christian perhaps the story is her way of exploring what an agnostic after-life might be.

Grackles

You know, women did not have a lot of options on how to support themselves and their families. They could be a governess, a teacher, maybe a nurse. That's about it, really. Being a writer sounds pretty good in comparison to most of that, and if you could actually generate a decent flow of stories that were salable, you could make A LOT more money. And sit down while you were working. Attractive, is all I'm saying.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I do like a melancholy weird. I didn't get the sense that she was being punished by anything more than her own self-critical mind. I think most folks have had times when we relive our failings - self-flagellation in which we scream, or beg, or whimper for our own hand to stop the beating. To no avail.

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

I had this whole dissertation about how her afterlife could be read as either a Christian Hell brought about by choosing not to confess the sin before taking the sacrament and passing, or a personal psychological Hell brought about by unresolved feelings of shame, disappointment, and despair that she settled for a relationship that gave her gratification once, but then was simply a habit she couldn’t break even when she recognized her dependence on it and resented that. (Like drugs or alcohol... but instead an emotionally abusive jerk with whom you’re both making each other miserable.) … but ultimately all I can say is, “Good golly, I’m so glad I’m in therapy so I can talk to a professional about all the little ways I identify with this woman.”

Michael Bernth

Oh boy, I can't wait to hear your take on Child's Play. It was part of my curriculum in primary school and it really made an impression. It was also made into a short animation by Danish director Jannik Hastrup, called Just a Prank (Blot en drengestreg) but unfortunately I can't find an online version freely available – children's entertainment in Denmark can be rather different.

Sundance

I just wanted to say thank you to Chris, Chad and everyone involved with this podcast and listeners alike. I recently learned one of my best friends who I love with all my heart and soul passed away. Going into work the next day, I was fighting back tears and this podcast definitely helped me through the day. Made me laugh and feel not alone. Thank you all for what you do

Bret Kramer

I had a real visceral dislike of this story. It was just a couple HAW! HAW!s short of being a Chick Tract.

Markus Lauerer

I first came across this story in the second one of the two "Black Water" anthologies by Alberto Manguel. Manguel served as amanuensis to a blind Jorge Luis Borges and was almost as absurdly read as Borges himself. His two "Black Water" anthologies are the best collections of weird literature I've ever had the pleasure of discovering. They collect stories from all over the world, so there's many little known but delightfully inventive ones. It also contains "The Tall Woman" by the Argentinian Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, which is insanely creepy for a story written in 1882.

Sanjay Mathew

I first read this on the old HorrorMasters website. I think it may be one of the bleakest stories I've ever read. The Biblical allusion in the title is to Mark 9 '43 And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: 44Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.' Straightforward religious horror aside, I guess it could be read to be about obsessiveness?

Jim Cannon

What a rum deal. Unlucky at love and then... punished eternally for being unlucky at love? Or for making some bad choices, I guess. But it sure sounds like she suffered in life and death was no respite. Almost a fate worse than any Lovecraft protagonist: you might discover your great-grandfather boinked a gorilla, but at least you have that sweet oblivion to look forward to once the fire burns out. Not poor Harriott.

Jason Thompson

There is a special micro genre of “what happens when you die” horror stories that really are the scariest ever. Like that Aleister Crowley story you read awhile back. Or R.A. lafferty’s “Fog in My Throat” (which you should also read). Hey, someone could make a “most depressing horror stories about death” anthology to distribute at hospitals and old folks’ homes!

Jason Thompson

Honestly, even if we are to assume it was the extramarital sex and not the guilt that sent her to Hell, fundamentalist Christian beliefs make for some super scary horror. It reminds me of how some people said they couldn’t get into “The VVitch” because it depicts a fundamentalist (traditionalist) Christian worldview. Well heck! That’s a frickin’ terrifying worldview! Don’t accept Jesus (or don’t give your deathbed confession, if you’re Catholic) and you are F-U-C-K-ED

Pete Williams

I recently read The Haunting of Hill House and the ending of this bummed me out in the same the ending of that did. Like I have read something I truly enjoyed and it's the most appropriate ending even if it's not how you want the character to end up.

Jason Thompson

I always dislike supernatural setups where “your guilt is what sends you to Hell”, since clearly many of the most evil people feel no guilt whatsoever. It’s sort of just the writer punting “well, clearly person X *must* feel guilty on some level” which feels like wishful thinking.

Ethan Cordray

I think we can find it hard to understand this story if we look at it as simply "punishment for sin." If we read Harriett's fate as simply a punishment for adultery, it does seem unjust, since the affair itself seems unpleasant enough to serve as its own punishment. But there's more going on in the story than that. This is a character study of Harriett, and the first two vignettes of her life are as crucial to understanding her as the last two are. She is caught up in an idealistic desire for heightened romantic fulfillment, which haunts all of her relationships. We have trouble thinking of Harriett as a "sinner," because she seems so passive -- things mostly just happen to her, she hardly "does" anything. But her "sin" is not really an action; it is the selfishness of her romanticized image of love. She can't let go of her own idealized self-image -- that's why, at the end, she's judging the "fallen girls" that she "ministered to," while not acknowledging that her fixation on the vicar is worse. Harriett's "sin" isn't lust, it's pride -- imagining that she had been higher and more virtuous than Oscar, that her disappointment and loathing for him came from her goodness, not from a self-indulgent feeling of spiritual superiority. In her death, Oscar infects her other romantic memories because their affair was the culmination of her self-regard. The awfulness of Oscar could have shown her that her own romanticism had led only to disappointment and frustration, into entanglement with this worthless boring selfish jerk. But she doesn't learn that lesson. She gains no deeper self-knowledge from it -- she hides it from shame, but only the shame of appearance. She doesn't reflect on why she became the sort of person who would carry on with Oscar, she doesn't think about what that says about her own deficiencies. So, in death, the self-reflection that she failed to do in life becomes horrifically forced upon her. She is directly confronted with how Oscar is the natural conclusion of all of her other romantic pursuits. As Oscar infests all her other memories of life, she is confronted with how every part of her personality led her to their entanglement. I would call this a spiritual horror story, though not really a religious one. Harriett's damnation is interior to her own self, not imposed upon her by a divine power. And unfortunately, the story doesn't seem to offer any religious opportunity for forgiveness and redemption. She's stuck in her own self, and there's no God in the story to let her out.

Matt Walsh

My wife-to-be and I bought a 1920s bungalow in Houston about 10 years ago. Needed a lot of work, including a new hot water heater up in the attic (it's a Houston thing; put a 800 lbs. water balloon above your living room and see what happens!). So I go up there and find a bunch of stuff besides an old heater: * the Sears and Roebuck catalog page of our house - neat! * an old (old old) 3' diameter box fan. * a shoe box full of lizard eggs. * 3 children's shoes, all left foot. * a bunch of bricks (this is a wooden house, mind). * and yeah, a creepy-ass old Raggedy Andy with a bunch of roofing nails shot into its body, like you do. No books, but ol' Santeria Andy here tells me you guys should keep up the good work!

Moonflight Dancer

This story precedes Sarte's No Exit by around 22 years if I am not mistaken and the themes of the story, where attraction is the thing that tortures the characters are also similar. I don't know enough about Sarte to say where he ripped it off, but I do know it is interesting to see the modern conception of hell in existentialist literature.

Peter Larsen

I like Ethan Cordray's readings of this story, so I have very little to add, since I had kind of taken it as "Girl buys into myths about what women are supposed to be like, get punished, doesn't perform "romantic womanhood" well, gets punished some more, then gets so tied up in it later in her life that she can't let go at all>" Which is... just bleak. I guess all the readings are.