AN essay by john probert on 'The Surgeon's Tale' from pan #29

Beginning with the best framing device outside of an Oscar Cook story,

J P Dixon’s opener for the 29th Pan Book of Horror Stories starts off in an early twentieth century surgeons’ club. In an atmosphere of comfortable armchairs, convivial company, and sparking logs on the fire the conversation turns to the ability of the individual to withstand and recover from serious, sometimes life-threatening trauma. We are introduced to Tobin, who is going to relate the tale that follows, and the author very efficiently sets up the kind of story we are to expect from our narrator’s first few words:

‘I believe that (the ability to survive trauma) can be a conscious act. So much so, indeed, that trauma is actively sought in order that it can be experienced for its own sake…..I do not mean masochism as such….In the case I refer to the inflicting of pain itself was not a factor, could not have been.’

And so we are introduced to the fascinating, perverse, beautiful, ultimately tragic Paulette, who despite her rather unusual predilection emerges effortlessly from this story as without a doubt one of the most sympathetic characters to appear in the entire Pan series. According to our narrator he first meets her in Autumn 1889, when working at a hospital in London’s East End. Grand guignol has reached the height of its popularity and is starting to decline, with audiences who attend such staged atrocities in the area’s cheap theatres on the lookout for the next sensation. Despite the fact that her shows are few and the ticket prices far in excess of what would be considered reasonable for the time her performances are always a sell-out and Tobin soon realises why. Pauline’s acts of mutilation are not so much theatrical grand guignol but the real thing – live amputations performed by herself on her own person before an audiences jaded by staged theatrics and tired of acts such as her previous incarnation as ‘the human pin cushion’.

Despite the wealth she has been able to accumulate as a result of her unique performances, we soon discover that Paulette isn’t doing this for the money. Paulette is obsessed.

‘How much can be removed from a body before that body dies?’

And now she has reached the point where she needs Tobin’s expertise to help her. The love angle is tipped in here gently but firmly and gives the reader a reason to believe that Tobin would take this strange, beautiful woman up on her horrific offer. From then on the stage has two performers: the operator and the operated upon.

Events continue until they reach a logical conclusion – by a variety of actually ludicrous procedures made wholly believable by our narrator Paulette is reduced to a ‘small featureless bock of flesh perhaps twelve inches by twelve inches by eight inches’. Following this, and with the realisation that no more of her tissue can possibly be removed without her dying, Paulette eventually passes away ‘from simple boredom’, leaving our hero with his mercifully regained sanity and absolutely no wish to perform the same function for Paulette’s daughter who it would seem has inherited her obsession.

By 1988 The Pan Book of Horror Stories was flagging, both in terms of the quality of stories between its covers and in terms of sales. I remember at the time feeling that the unsatisfactory ransacking of Stephen King’s Night Shift collection to bolster weak volumes wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of the series, which had tended only to reprint stories that were difficult to obtain otherwise. Only one further volume would follow this one, at such a reduced print run that copies now change hands for sums neither van Thal nor Clarence Paget would ever have dreamed of. Even fans of the series would admit that many of the stories in these later volumes are flat, uninspired, and with an over-reliance on graphic sensationalism for its own sake.

JP Dixon’s The Surgeon’s Tale, however, is something special. The Pan Book of Horror could always be relied upon to include a nasty surgery story fairly regularly, all the way from the failed amateur leg transplant antics of Flavia Richardson’s Behind the Yellow Door in Pan 1 and T H McCormick’s vengeful ‘Man with a Knife’ in Pan 12 through to this endearing and unexpectedly sympathetic tale of a beautiful woman’s horrific obsession and the man swept up by both it and her. Far more complex than the series’ usual fare the story is by turns a well-written period piece, a love story, and a tale of obsession, with an ending that is sad rather than shocking. Indeed there is very little of the gleeful dwelling on cruelty and misery prevalent in so many Pan stories, and what little there is comes from the audiences who attend Paulette’s shows rather than the individual who is causing her the injuries. In fact rather than feel distress, Paulette positively revels in the response she provokes by her self-mutilation:

‘She took a perverse delight in peoples’ reactions to her amputations. She flaunted them in public. Where another would have fallen into despair at such crippling injuries she delighted in them and gloried in the shock and dismay they evoked in other people.’

Operating theatres were originally so named because they were designed such that students and other interested parties could observe and learn from the procedure being demonstrated. Here Dixon takes the concept to its extreme, giving us a true theatre in which operations take place, the true horror not being so much what is happening onstage but that its purpose is for entertainment (at which it succeeds all too well) rather than education.

The fact that Paulette can feel no pain is important and is one of the reasons the story is a standout. Throughout the relating of the tale we know that things can only end in tragedy. Fortunately Dixon resists the temptation to end things in a blaze of gory histrionics with a final major procedure that goes horribly wrong, and instead allows her the dignity of a quiet ending, leaving the character of Danforth to berate Tobin as follows:

‘Either you are the greatest liar that ever lived or you have known and experienced an aspect of human nature that should never exist or be spoken of freely.’

The critics of the Pan series as a whole might well have wished to apply Danforth’s comment to many of its authors, but it is because of stories like ‘The Surgeon’s Tale’ that the series has endured and is still remembered with tremendous affection by connoisseurs of the macabre tale. Considered by some to be amongst the very best of all those scary stories collected by Messrs van Thal and Paget in the Pan Book of Horror series, it was not until I was asked to provide a few words on ‘The Surgeon’s Tale’ that I realised I had not read it in twenty years, not since I picked up a copy of the 29th Pan Book of Horror Stories from a railway station bookstall in Birmingham New Street. The fact that time had done little to diminish my memory of it, and that the story was just as good as I remembered it to be, is a testament to its enduring quality.

John L Probert is a horror author and a long time fan of the Pan Horror series. His new collection of short stories, Coffin Nails is out now to buy from Ash-Tree Press. You can buy a copy from here.