“The Business of Madame Jahn” was written by Vincent O’Sullivan and first appeared in A Book of Bargains (1896). O’Sullivan (1868-1940), an American, was one of the central figures in the English Decadent/fin-de-siècle movement of the 1890s and is one of the best horror fiction writers of the past hundred years. The degree to which his name draws no recognition from most fans of supernatural fiction says much the cruelty of posterity.

Gustave Herbout is a frustrated young man whose tastes are greater than his wallet. He lives for nights in the café and outings with a little lady with yellow hair, for the dress and habits of the boulevardier. But his bank clerk’s salary restricts what he can do. His only extra income is in the form of gifts from his aunt, Madame Jahn, and Gustave only receives these gifts after long, dull dinners with her, followed by games of dominoes and more tedious conversation with the fat local priest. As these evenings’ end, Madame Jahn appears and slips Gustave fifty or one hundred francs, or sometimes nothing at all. Gustave, feeling pressure to buy more gifts for his yellow-haired lady friend, goes to the race track. He briefly wins some money and spends it on her, but then he loses heavily, and she goes off on the arm of a German. This causes Gustave to think seriously about his future. His aunt is only just sixty, and his mother had lived to be ninety, and he might not see his aunt’s money for many years. So Gustave makes his plan, and visits his aunt, and listens carefully to her stories, and then stabs her through the heart. Gustave wrecks the room in which he killed his aunt, and then abuses her body, and then wanders to a bar and picks a fight, which results in his being in jail when his aunt’s body is discovered. After the funeral Gustave gets his aunt’s profitable shop, and all its money. But then he begins being visited. The first visitor is a pretty young girl who looks like his aunt did when she was young. His second visitor is an older woman who looks as his aunt did many years ago. And so on across several nights. Each time the woman stares at him silently, with great reproachless eyes, until one night a corpse enters his room, “as if borne by unseen men, and lay in the air across the writing desk, while the small drawer flew open of its own accord.”¹ Gustave looks at the corpse’s eyes, and sees them pressed down with pennies. He flees, but the corpse follows him. When he asks the corpse if it is alive, it says, “No, no! I have been dead many days!”² Gustave hangs himself.

As in “When I Was Dead,” O’Sullivan creates, in “The Business of Madame Jahn,” a sharp story which grows upon reflection. “Madame Jahn” lacks the intensity and insanity of “When I Was Dead,” but what the story has is a plausible protagonist, a traditionally effective scenario–a revenant come back to haunt her murderer--a matter-of-fact narration which heightens the frightening elements, and a powerful ending.

Contemporary critics inveighed against O’Sullivan’s work, and he died in abject poverty, but posterity has removed him from his pauper’s grave and set him up as he deserves: as a master of horror. “The Business of Madame Jahn” is only second-tier O’Sullivan, but in the words of horror expert Jessica Amanda Salmonson, it is “still so far above the average encountered elsewhere as to be recognizable as works of a master.”³

Print: Vincent O’Sullivan, A Book of Bargains. Turnbridge Wells, UK: Solis Press, 2014.

¹ Vincent O’Sullivan, “The Business of Madame Jahn,” A Book of Bargains (London: L. Smithers, 1896), 95.

² O’Sullivan, “The Business of Madame Jahn,” 96.

³ Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “A Fallen Master of the Macabre: Vincent O'Sullivan, the Friend of Oscar Wilde,” Violet Books, Web Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20060205200818/http://www.violetbooks.com/vincent.html