Official Blog of Poet and Author Andrew Barger: Review of "What Was It" by Fitz James O'Brien

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Review of "What Was It" by Fitz James O'Brien

Fitz James O’Brien

(1828-1862)

A number of Irish horror writers appear in The Best Horror Short Stories 1850-1849: A 6a66le Horror Anthology. Fitz James O’Brien is one of them. He was born in Cork, Ireland. His father was an attorney and O’Brien later attended Dublin University where Joseph Le Fanu published many of his fantastic horror stories in The Dublin University Magazine. O’Brien subsequently moved to the United States where well-known publications like the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Magazine discovered his supernatural fiction.

He was also a poet and wrote a number of poems in the scary short story genre including “The Gory Gnome” and “The Demon of the Gibbet.” In 1853, his first short story, “The Two-Skulls,” possessed elements of horror.

The subsequent years 1858 and 1859 were watershed years for O’Brien’s fictional short stories in the horror and fantasy genres. His most popular was “The Diamond Lens” (1858), published in the Atlantic Monthly, which tells of a secret world found under a microscope. He also penned that same year “From Hand to Mouth,” which is a precursor to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in surrealistic fiction. In 1859 the Atlantic Monthly also printed O’Brien’s “The Wondersmith” where dolls are brought to life in a macabre fashion.

That same year is when O’Brien published one of the best horror stories for the last half of the nineteenth century in “What Was it? A Mystery.” The short horror story employs the first use of invisibility in a horror story and perhaps the first in fiction. Invisibility would be used in the stories of many great authors.

In 1881 Bram Stoker published “The Invisible Giant.” “What Was it?” also influenced Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” (1886) and H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), the popular author of the next story.

“What Was It?” shows that the power of the unseen can be the most frightening of all. It is the second oldest story in this collection and plays its part in the annals of monster horror.

The story was a smashing success. As one editor put it, “Would you believe me, such an impression did this story make upon the American public, that inside of six week’s (sic) time, (20,000) twenty thousand letters came to the Harpers’ (sic) office, full of queries and requests for further news.”

“What Was It?” is set in New York on Twenty-sixth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.