“What Was It?” was written by Fitz-James O’Brien and first appeared in Harper’s (Mar. 1859). Michael Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) is one of the sadder literary might-have-beens: a talented Irish American writer who was killed at a young age in the Civil War, he left behind a series of excellent stories and sad thoughts about what he might have created had he lived as long as Ambrose Bierce. “What Was It?” is a dandy gem of horror, surprisingly modern in tone and content.

Harry, the narrator of “What Was It?” lives with several other boarders in a house in New York City. The house is reputed to be haunted, but when the boarders moved into the house they did not treat the house with respect and fear but instead avidly waited for manifestations of chains and spectral forms. Nothing appeared, so the boarders began to take the house for granted. One night Harry and his friend Doctor Hammond retire to the house’s garden to smoke opium together. Their conversation turns to the possible existence of “the greatest element of terror”¹ and the “one Something more terrible than any other thing.”² More than a little unhappy with this topic, Harry turns in early. He is trying to fall asleep when “a Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat, endeavoring to choke me.” A terrible struggle follows, with Harry barely mastering it and then turning on the light.

Nothing’s there. The Something can be felt but not seen. Other boarders, having heard Harry’s screams, rush into the room and are confronted by the presence of the invisible It. This (understandably) unnerves them. Doctor Hammond helps Harry tie It up, and then the pair keep It in their room while they decide what to do. They consult Doctor X—, who after getting over the shock of Its existence administers chloroform to It and then takes a clay cast of it, divining its shape. But Harry and Doctor Hammond have no idea what to do with It, and they keep It prisoner. After two weeks It dies of starvation. It is buried in the garden, and then Harry departs on “a long journey from which I may not return,”³ leaving behind his narrative.

“What Was It?” is told in a modern fashion, with a directness and a matter-of-fact tone and without any of the stiffer rhetoric of some O’Brien’s English contemporaries. The story moves quickly. Its lack of overwrought description helps make the horror of It more powerful and makes the story more frightening to the modern reader than something from Poe. O’Brien was clearly knowledgeable about other horror writers–he name-drops Bulwer Lytton (see: The Haunted and the Haunters), Mrs. Crowe (see: The Adventures of Susan Hopley), and Charles Brockden Brown (see: Wieland; or, The Transformation)–but he was writing something different from their work. “What Was It?” does have in common with the work of writers like Amelia B. Edwards (see: “How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries”) and Charlotte Riddell (see: “A Terrible Vengeance”) a lack of over-arching morality, Christian or otherwise, and a lack of artificially-imposed poetic justice. It appears, attacks Harry, is defeated, and then dies, with no explanation given. The story ends on a note of anti-closure, in fact, as a rebuke to the sometimes forced inscribed morality of O’Brien’s contemporaries. O’Brien’s universe is our own, where bad things, like attacks in the night, simply happen without any reason for them.

Print: Brian Stableford, ed., Scientific Romance: An International Anthology of Pioneering Science Fiction. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2017.

¹ Fitz-James O’Brien, “What Was It?” in The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien (Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company, 1881), 395.

² O’Brien, “What Was It?” 396.

³ O’Brien, “What Was It?” 407.