The Scariest Winter Tale

It’s been a long time since I published anything to this blog, and now that I’m getting back into the craft of essay writing, I want to talk about one of my favourite short stories of all time. This is a story that scared me when I first read it, and rereading it early this year, I still found myself unsettled. As Winter comes to a close, let’s talk about a short horror story that takes place in a vast, cold landscape, and makes you glad to return to your warm home as the final words cascade down the page.

Let’s talk about, ‘In Amundsen’s Tent.’

Written by John Martin Leahy, this is a story that feels as contemporary as it is classic, with every aspect of the tale being purposefully geared towards evoking that horror response.

In Amundsen’s Tent takes us to the Antarctic – a classic setting of the horror and science fiction genres because that place is, or used to be, the outer limits of human exploration. It’s a place humans don’t belong, and it was, at the time, a place we knew very little about. It’s a setting that would later be supplanted by outer space and distant planets, but for me, there’s something in the combination of familiar and unfamiliar elements that makes this uncanny tale feel strangely more alien – the endless white plain, lacking both day and night thanks to the Sun hovering always in the same place, and the vast emptiness, so cold, and hostile.

Of course a lot of that can be said about space too, but can you walk there? Can you touch it? Could you yourself feasibly go there right now if you wished to?

On top of all this, while it can be fascinating to read about a distant, fictional planet with completely unknown plants and animals and environments, there’s something familiar to the Antarctic with its snow, its waters, and the very small number of Earth animals you may encounter there. And it’s that uncanny combination of the familiar and unfamiliar that is so particularly effective.

There’s also a subtlety, a quietness to this particular setting, that is my preferred approach to horror. There’s something in it that forces you to be still, quiet and motionless, and seek out the horror that you know must be there. The attentiveness a subtlety like this brings out in the reader both enhances and makes personal the horror you experience, in a way that a more intensified and in-your-face style of horror can’t often match.

Of course, neither approach is inherently superior, and it’s the variety that I so love in this genre – but I am beginning to feel more of an affinity for the subtle side of horror, and this story really showcases how brilliant such an approach can be.

The story doesn’t begin straight away here. Like many classic horror stories, we are first introduced via a framing device – a couple of fragments of letters, then a narration of one adventurer’s discovery of a severed head and journal inside a tent – not the titular tent, not yet. As classic as an approach like this is, reading the epistolary often brings to my mind the more contemporary style of creepypasta, inviting the reader to involve themselves in the realness of the tale, to explore it as a work of fact rather than fiction – which is possibly why it sets my mind to unease right from the onset. But it’s ideas like this that are so timeless, which is why an old story can seem fresh, and a recent story can seem more prescient than its age would imply.

As effective as this framing device is, it’s the discovered journal that is the core of the experience. Here is where the real genius of the story lies for me. And it’s divided into three crucial parts.

First of all, we open with the third of January. There is no real fear in this introduction, not for the characters, who are more focused on the beauty of their environment (because a setting can be equal parts beautiful and horrific) and the knowledge of the possibility of great achievement. But they know there is danger here too, and coupled with our framing device, we can anticipate fear in a way that places the burden of building tension on the reader as much as it is developed in the story itself. Even so, both the men and their dogs are in fine spirits, creating a positive mood that nicely contrasts everything to follow.

There’s a fair bit of philosophising in this section that brings to mind science fiction of the era moreso than horror, but it places questions in the reader’s mind in a way that adds a lot of depth to the story in advance of the genuinely unsettling aspects still to come. Questions about whether this universe was built for mankind (described as god spirits in ape bodies) or whether there are other beings out there too. Our narrator mentions Fairyland, a feeling this setting gives him, but the implication is as much alien as it is folklore or supernatural.

It works for me, because it’s characters theorising and contemplating in a very real manner, that allows for interpretation rather than straight telling us what the upcoming threat is to be. It also allows for the interpretation of madness, that none of the horror will actually be outside the characters’ heads. But I’m getting ahead of myself here – and the biggest factor is, ultimately, the sense of nameless, unknown entities. Watching.

There’s a sense, however minor, of fear and the uncanny even in this mostly positive opening. A perfect build up for subtle horror.

The diary entry for the following day, the fourth of January, validates this build up. The author begins by ratcheting up the atmosphere – clouds block the Sun and cast the place into a weird gloom, the dogs become starkly afraid of something unknown, and most of all – a tent. In the distance, half known to be the cause of fear even as they cannot explain why.

What follows is the most awesome (and awful) stretch of ‘fear of the unknown’ horror I have ever encountered in fiction. Let’s break this down:

The dogs get very scared of the tent, as if warning their humans to keep away.

One man, the captain, looks inside the tent – he hesitates, for too long. Then an almost inhuman scream and he comes out, traumatised, half mad, begging the others not to look inside.

Of course, the second man looks inside too, thinking his captain insane. He then comes out just as traumatised, terrified by this Thing inside the tent.

Finally the last man, our first person narrator, wants to look inside. But the other two refuse to allow him to look inside the tent – thus depriving us readers of that knowledge also.

From here the two men who looked inside drive each other more and more afraid with wild fantasies and imaginings as to what this Thing might or might not be, and how many there might or might not be, and what danger humanity might or might not be in – and most importantly we, and our narrator, are left completely in the dark.

This scene is, to me, the genius of this story, and it’s both why it scares me so much, and also why I so heartily recommend this story to people at every opportunity. It’s the kind of ambiguous, mysterious, open to interpretation horror I especially love, and especially in the short story form. Is there a real monster? Is it alien or supernatural? Is it instead just a strange sight they have seen, even a vision or other dimension or just a particularly unsightly corpse? Or maybe our characters are merely unreliable narrators, gone mad from isolation in this hostile landscape – does that explain it all?

Never being allowed to look in the tent ourselves, we don’t get a definitive answer…

Mostly.

*There will be spoilers ahead*

Because this is a short story, it’s especially difficult to stay away from spoilers in an essay like this one. I’m trying not to outright spoil the details for you, but I’m giving a spoiler warning anyway as I want you to read this story yourself as blind as possible for your first time, before I get to the third and final part of this story. If you want an easy way to get hold of ‘In Amundsen’s Tent,’ look into the short story anthologies the British Library publish. They do ‘Tales of the Weird’ anthologies quite often, and they also used to do ‘Science Fiction Classics’ – every one of these anthologies I’ve read is brilliant and I can’t recommend them enough.

The story at the heart of this blog post is included in the Science Fiction Classics anthology titled ‘Menace of the Monster.’ There are some other cool stories in that one as well, but I won’t judge if you want to skip straight to this story to begin with.

While the third of January was an introduction, and the fourth of January was the meat of the story, what follows is a chaotic nightmare of an ending, using a sequence of very short diary entries, essentially offering nothing but a terrified monologue of some Thing following the three characters. The story continues to reveal pretty much nothing, which means us readers are still in the dark even if our narrator might not necessarily be anymore.

Cleverly, the author gives us just enough detail to evoke that powerful horror response, while holding enough back that we remain on the edge of knowledge and understanding.

This is truly the fear of the unknown, and it’s handled more effectively than most cosmic horror stories, but I love that we get these tiny, almost inscrutable details that lets us know, if nothing else, we really do need to be afraid.

As for what this horror, this “creature” is? No idea! The story title promises to reveal some horror contained within Amundsen’s tent but it never actually does. And I love that.

To finish off, why do I find this story so compelling, and why does it scare me more than most horror stories can? What makes it so uniquely special?

1. It employs a subtle kind of horror rather than the intensity contemporary horror audiences have become accustomed to, forcing the reader to be attentive which in turn allows for a more personal experience that opens us up to our own interpretation of whatever unsettling nightmare is to follow.

2. Writers often quote Lovecraft in advising the use of fear of the unknown above all else, and this story is the embodiment of that phobia. John Martin Leahy never lets us peek inside the tent, he never lets us understand what is pursuing our narrator, he never really gives us much of anything – but he makes sure we know we should be scared of whatever this Thing is.

3. The use of a framing device that brings to mind tactics used by earlier Gothic writers as well as later internet horror writers lends the story an element of realism and depth by involving other characters who have laid their eyes on this story before us, giving just enough for us to wonder – might it have happened? 

‘In Amundsen’s Tent’ is a vastly underrated story that I never hear anybody talking about, and it deserves to get more eyes on it. I hope I’ve convinced you of that, without spoiling too much of one of my favourite stories.