Riccardo Stephens – The Cruciform Mark
Chatto & Windus, London, 1896, 1st edn.
Weird novel that could have been a genre classic
The binding for this book is very attractive: black cloth with a red-stamped floral design surrounding a crucifix which bears the novel title. The spine titles are gilt and the page tops are gilded too. My copy has a 32pp Nov. 1895 catalogue bound in to the rear.

The novel concerns the strange events which take place at a medical college in Edinburgh towards the end of nineteenth century. The story comprises the first person narrative as recounted by one Richard Treganna, Bachelor of Medicine. Various bodies are found which bear the imprint of a cruciform on the neck. All that is known of the victims is that each acted hysterically in the days leading up their deaths. The narrator is unwillingly psychic, possessed of second sight, and he experiences many supernatural visions, usually involving a sphinx-like face which appears to him at night, emanating from clouds and mist. As the face draws closer to him, he sees that the feminine creature is a gigantic serpent with two sharp pointed teeth, and the suggestion is that these teeth are linked to the deaths. Treganna’s best friend begins to experience these visions too, except that the face appears to him in crowded rooms, in the street, in lecture rooms. One of their acquaintances, a violinist, becomes obsessed with playing eerie music which is both terrifying and mesmerising. A servant girl refuses to enter one of the rooms, claiming to have seen a ghost. An elderly, respectable professor invites Treganna to his home one evening and, after plying him with opiated hashish, uses white magic to invoke occult powers: the two men stand safely within a pentangle as the Elementals from the other world swirl around the room, trying to break through. Then the terrible yet enigmatic visage of the sphinx-like woman appears, and Treganna finds himself almost unable to resist yielding to her. There are many other references to supernatural creatures e.g. selkies, mermaids, vampires throughout the text.

In addition to this supernatural content, there is an academic who experiments with extremely poisonous water snakes, injecting himself with minute quantities of the creatures’ venom to see what effect it has upon the human nervous system. This is a red herring as far as the story goes, but throughout the novel you do wonder whether the snakes will be the key to the puzzle. There is also a wealth of major and minor characters, all of whom could be involved in the escalating mystery; in fact, the sheer number of incidental characters is one of the book’s flaws, as is the author’s attempts to celebrate the Bohemian literary style of the 1890s, as typified by prose that is often too verbose and self-conscious. Fewer characters and a brisker writing style would have made this an even better novel.

 The imagery and descriptive narrative employed is to a very high standard: Stephens’ depiction of landscape and supernatural imagery is very well handled. The acrid, cloying atmosphere evoked in the old parts of Edinburgh really makes the reader feel that he or she is there. Stephens’ narrational outlook is a little like Vincent O’Sulliavn’s: his character Treganna doesn’t suffer fools, is very much his own man, and never shirks from expressing his honest opinion, no matter how cantankerous or uncharitable that opinion might be. I found this disregard for diplomacy refreshing and it made Treganna all the more real as a character.

 The deaths – or more correctly, the murders – are eventually found to have been caused by a beautiful siren-like woman who had the wealthy young men of Edinburgh flinging themselves at her feet. Undoubtedly she possesses occult powers, though to what extent is ambiguous. [Treganna’s professor friend argues that she is possessed by an Elemental.] She possesses a crystal that can foretell the future, and she uses this to mesmerise her victims. She controls and murders them by pressing a tiny cruciform-shaped ring upon their necks (a beryl, presumably also possessed of occult power). She also flits in and out of people’s with great ease, once having been mistaken for a ghost. When she is finally caught in the act and pursued, she falls to her death, and an autopsy subsequently reveals that her brain had suffered from a past trauma, and that a tumour had grown in its place. This is used to explain her mental derangement and acute powers of mesmerism. It is this tumour which affected her mind and caused her to stalk and then kill her prey by the full moon, when her mental derangement was at its peak.

 Bearing in mind the novel’s affectations of decadence, its setting within the field of medicine and the supernatural content, it would not be unreasonable to conjecture that Riccardo Stephens was influenced by Arthur Machen’s novelettes The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light. The influence of Robert Louis Stevenson is obvious, given the Edinburgh setting, the antics of ‘resurrection men’ who in the book are employed by the students to inter corpses for them, and the exploration into criminal psychology. The villainess of the piece is, after all, a Jekyll & Hyde character herself, though instead of drinking a chemical potion to effect a physiological change, a brain tumour and heightened occult powers bring about her transformation.

 The Cruciform Mark is a superior novel which is well worth seeking out. Had the author resolved the tale by portraying the villainess as a bona-fide vampire or werewolf, then this would be a classic of the genre, for it is stylish and well-written. Yet for all that the novel is still an impressive tale of supernatural horror, full of many memorable images and turns of phrase. It is alas quite uncommon and can only become more so.