The Terror of Blue John Gap

“The Terror of Blue John Gap” by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Strand, August 1910) is a personal favorite of mine, along with C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s “The Lizard”, and Fred M. White’s “The Purple Terror”. What all these stories have in common is they are horror tales but not supernatural tales. They all involve biological monsters, terrifying but natural. Unlike a ghost or a vampire, these tales exist within the realm of Science, not outside it.

The creature that dwells in the cave near Blue John Gap, a place named after an old Roman mine, appears:

 “In the blaze of the gun I caught a glimpse of a great shaggy mass, something with rough and bristling hair of a withered gray color, fading away to white in its lower parts, the huge body supported upon short, thick, curving legs…Its hair looked like coarse faded oakum, and hung down in long, dense masses which swayed as it moved. It was like an enormous unclipped sheep in its fleece, but in size it was larger than the largest elephant, and its breadth seemed to be nearly as great as its height…he reared up on his hind legs as a bear would do…if one could conceive a bear which was tenfold the bulk of any bear seen upon earth—in his whole pose and attitude, in his great crooked forelegs with their ivory-white claws, in his rugged skin, and in his red, gaping mouth, fringed with monstrous fangs…the eyes…were huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless…”(“The Terror of Blue John Gap” by A. Conan Doyle)

This creature lives deep in a subterranean light-less world, possibly evolving from an ancient race of cave bears. Its only access to the outer world is through the Blue John Gap. Light is painful to the Terror’s eyes, even moonlight. The Terror due to its size moves very quickly but with little sound.

This story, as with all these stories listed here, is important because it is one of the first pieces of fiction to deal with sightings of weird creatures, something we have become somewhat accepting about in our age of Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster. In Doyle’s time, readers were often presented with strange things from nature, in newspaper pieces about new discoveries or explorations. The Victorian world opened up all the remaining frontiers (for good or bad).

A horror fiction based so strongly on Science would have been less accessible to readers before 1820. This was one of the revelations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The book was supported by Science, not the supernatural. The Gothic novels (beginning 1765) that proceeded it offered up terrors but then explained them all away. So this was a gradual process that pushed readers towards logically explained but terrifying creatures.

Doyle wrote a few more tales in the same vein including “The American’s Tale” (plant monster), “The Horror of the Heights” (aerial serpents) and “The Fiend of the Cooperage” (snake). But of all these “The Terror of Blue John Gap” is my favorite because the monster itself is so intriguing. It is perhaps the best told of the lot as well, though that is an opinion. The location of North-West Derbyshire may also be part of the fun. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles I enjoy Doyle when he writes about England. (That may be a Canadian thing, I don’t know.)

This piece is decorated with The Strand illustrations by Harry Rountree. He is quickly becoming my favorite artist of that period, replacing Sidney Paget. Rountree also did the illos for The Lost World and The Poison Belt.