The Croquet Player

By H.G. Wells

This book contains H. G. Wells' 1936 novella, "The Croquet Player". A soul-corrupting evil has invaded the remote English village of Cainsmarsh, infesting the minds of the local residents. An old woman fears her own shadow; a petrified farmer plots the murder of a scarecrow; family pets are brutally killed, and previously-happy couples descend into anger and violence. A prophetic insight into the primitive distrust that threatens the modern world, "The Croquet Player" is not to be missed by fans of horror fiction. Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer who wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, politics, history, and social commentary. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the science fiction genre thanks to such novels as "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473345249

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells is considered by many to be the father of science fiction. He was the author of numerous classics such as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and many more. 

Book preview

THE CROQUET PLAYER

By

H. G. Wells

Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

Contents

H. G. Wells

I. THE CROQUET PLAYER INTRODUCES HIMSELF

II. HAUNTING FEAR IN CAINSMARSH

III. THE SKULL IN THE MUSEUM

IV. THE INTOLERABLE PSYCHIATRIST

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England in 1866. He apprenticed as a draper before becoming a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School in West Sussex. Some years later, Wells won a scholarship to the School of Science in London, where he developed a strong interest in biology and evolution, founding and editing the Science Schools Journal. However, he left before graduating to return to teaching, and began to focus increasingly on writing. His first major essay on science, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, appeared in 1891. However, it was in 1895 that Wells seriously established himself as a writer, with the publication of the now iconic novel, The Time Machine.

Wells followed The Time Machine with the equally well-received War of the Worlds (1898), which proved highly popular in the USA, and was serialized in the magazine Cosmopolitan. Around the turn of the century, he also began to write extensively on politics, technology and the future, producing works The Discovery of the Future (1902) and Mankind in the Making (1903). An active socialist, in 1904 Wells joined the Fabian Society, and his 1905 book A Modern Utopia presented a vision of a socialist society founded on reason and compassion. Wells also penned a range of successful comic novels, such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910).

Wells’ 1920 work, The Outline of History, was penned in response to the Russian Revolution, and declared that world would be improved by education, rather than revolution. It made Wells one of the most important political thinkers of the twenties and thirties, and he began to write for a number of journals and newspapers, even travelling to Russia to lecture Lenin and Trotsky on social reform. Appalled by the carnage of World War II, Wells began to work on a project dealing with the perils of nuclear war, but died before completing it. He is now regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction writers of all time, and an important political thinker.

I. THE CROQUET PLAYER

INTRODUCES HIMSELF

I have been talking to two very queer individuals and they have produced a peculiar disturbance of my mind. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they have infected me and distressed me with some very strange and unpleasant ideas. I want to set down what it is they have said to me in the first place for my own sake, so as to clear up my thoughts about it. What they told me was fantastic and unreasonable but I shall feel surer about that if I set it down in writing. Moreover I want to get my story into a shape that will enable one or two sympathetic readers to reassure me about the purely imaginative quality of what these two men had to say.

It is a sort of ghost story they unfolded. But it is not an ordinary ghost story. It is much more realistic and haunting and disturbing than any ordinary ghost story. It is not a story of a haunted house or a haunted churchyard or anything so limited. The ghost they told me about was something much larger than that, a haunting of a whole countryside, something that began as an uneasiness and grew into a fear and became by slow degrees a spreading presence. And still it grew—in size, in power and intensity. Until it became a continual overshadowing dread. I do not like this ghost that grows and spreads, even though it does so only in the mind. But I had better begin at the beginning and tell about this story as far as I can, and the manner in which it came to me.

But first I had better give a few particulars about myself. Of course I would rather I did not, but I doubt if you will realize my position without it. I am probably one of the best croquet players alive, and that I am not a bit ashamed of saying. I am also a first-rate archer. One is neither of these things without a considerable amount of discipline and balance in one's make- up. Many people, I know, find me a trifle effeminate and ridiculous because I make croquet my game; they say as much behind my back and at times they betray it to my face, and I admit there have been

Reviews for The Croquet Player

[datrappert · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A man, who lives with his aunt and spends most of his time playing croquet, meets a doctor at a resort who tells him a strange story about the goings on in the marshland he lives in. It's hard to know what to make of this story. It starts out as if Wells is channeling H.P. Lovecraft, with weird tales of buried evilness, although Wells' language is hardly as baroque as Lovecraft's. Then it sort of loses steam as it takes on the complexities of modern life - a bit of a foretaste of Toffler's Future Shock, actually. You have to take into account that Wells was writing it in 1936, of course, to understand the inherent warning he is trying, rather confusedly, to convey. In the end, it doesn't really work, I'm afraid.

[randystafford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My reaction to reading this story in 1937. Spoilers follow.This story can be considered as a ghost story or as an allegory about one of Wells’ main themes: the conquering of the brutish “cave man … who is in us”. The ghost story is not very effective. Wells, unlike some of his short stories, doesn’t do a very good job of creating an atmosphere here. The supposed haunting of Cainsmarsh doesn’t seem that threatening or oppressive. The alternate reading – and the one Wells very likely intended – is that the ancient skull unearthed in Cainsmarsh is not haunting the land but, as the psychologist Dr. Norbert says, is an allegory for man’s bestial nature breaking down civilization (indeed, civilization is pronounced a delusion.). The world is no longer “safe for anything.” This pessimism is quite understandable for a European after World War I. Wells possibly saw World War Two coming. As is usual for Wells, the book ends on a note of pleading for a new order: “a harder, stronger civilization.” Norbert pleads with the narrator – an upper class croquet player (devoting large chunks of time playing sports is satirized in Wells’ A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods) to forsake his animal nature and become “a stern devotee to that true civilization, that disciplined civilization” that needs to be created. There is something almost Lovecraftian in the notion of this impending doom driving “intellectual men” insane – including delusions of haunting. The narrator, one of Wells more engaging characters though obviously the subject of ironic attack, will have none of it. Norbert, to him, seems insane like Peter the Herbert, Savonarola, or John Knox, an apocalyptic preacher of “wrath to come”. The narrator concedes Norbert’s gloomy description of the world is true but doesn’t see what “our sort of people” (I suspect wells meant everyone, not just society’s elite) could do about it, how they could think up a new world. Wells prescribes no specifics for his “true civilization”. On second thought maybe Wells did mean to specifically castigate the elite who presumably have the most power and time to bring about a new order. Given his own life and his narrator, I doubt Wells ever regarded the upper class as inherently smarter. In a delightfully wry ending, the narrator says: “I don’t care. The world may be going to pieces. The Stone Age may be returning. This may, as you say, be the sunset of civilization. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it this morning. I have other engagements. … I am going to play croquet with my aunt at half-past twelve today."

[hermannstone · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

uncharacteristically dull & hackneyed.

[sean191 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had just finished reading The Invisible Man]so I was eager to dive into this. It really wasn't as deep...but the very last sentence did make me laugh. (I guess my review isn't as deep either!)

[lisahistory · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very much riffing on Edgar Allen Poe, and reading like an episode of Outer Limits (but without the resolution), the story is best at the expression of fear as a town comes under the cloud of . . . something.