Beast in the Shadows by Edogawa Rampo Review

A crime novelist meets a married woman who tells him about another crime novelist, her ex, who’s been sending her threatening letters and begun stalking her. These crime novelists, eh - they’re everywhere these days, especially in crime novels!

“Edogawa Rampo” is the Japanese trans-literation of “Edgar Allan Poe”, the pseudonym of Taro Hirai who quite liked the 19th century American writer. And, though I initially came across Rampo’s work after one of his horror stories had been adapted by mangaka Junji Ito (“The Human Chair”), his novella, Beast in the Shadows, is a crime story rather than a horror one - and not a good crime story at that!

The story’s not poorly written nor is the premise all that bad either (even if a possible solution early on is “put curtains on your windows to stop the guy from peeping in” which kinda undermines the threat! Curtains aren’t mentioned though - perhaps they weren’t widely used in 1920s Japan?).

But it does get increasingly dull, slow and irrecoverably convoluted as it goes on. Entire chapters become lengthy digressions on what might have happened where it feels like you’re reading Rampo’s notes on where to take his shaky story next. The layers of obfuscation are piled on until you’ve stopped caring by the time the big reveal rolls around, which in this case sees the author posit a bizarre scenario based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence leading to a silly melodramatic finale.

The ending is especially bad because if it’s true then the whole thing is really silly and if it’s not then it’s still really silly. It also made me inadvertently laugh at its dated casual misogyny by appending “... for a woman” and “only a woman could…” to statements presented as fact!

“The Human Chair” was a strikingly original story so perhaps Rampo’s horror is what I should’ve gone for (even though I didn’t realise he also wrote crime and thought I was picking up a horror novella here), which might be better than his crime fiction. As it is, Beast in the Shadows is an unsatisfying and tedious narrative that bores more than anything else.