By WILLIAM JOYCE COWEN (William Heinemann Ltd.; 1935)

Here’s something I don’t believe I’ve seen before in book packaging: a back cover blurb that acknowledges both the good and bad things about the book in question.  Said blub was written by Hugh Walpole, who enthusiastically dubs this 1935 novel “an experiment in the modern realistic macabre” with “a most original story to tell,” although regarding the author’s choice for an ending Walpole is “not sure that his solution was the true one.”

I’m in full agreement with all those points.  MAN WITH FOUR LIVES, written by an American citizen who fought alongside British armies in the Great War, is indeed a highly original account of macabre shenanigans in a wartime setting, and does indeed contain a solution that doesn’t ring true.

The story is narrated by one George Forrester, a British Medical Corps veteran.  The subject of his recounting is John Fenton, a young soldier whose first wartime kill, a German officer known as Hartman, is witnessed by George in 1914.  John is tormented by the killing, which George puts down to sexual frustration (due to an unconsummated marriage), but events take an unexpected turn when during a later skirmish John is faced with a severely wounded German who looks exactly like the first guy he killed, and answers to the same name.

It would seem that the deceased Hartman has returned to fight, and die, again—and, as the title indicates, he’s set to do so twice more.  Along the way William Joyce Cowen explores a number of issues, including the horrors of trench warfare (enhanced by the author’s own WWI experiences), combat shock, wartime romance and betrayal, with the seemingly immortal Hartman doing far more to wreak havoc on John’s life and mental state than merely appearing on battlefields.

The novel is quite compelling despite its old timey wraparound, in which a supporting character is tasked with relating the events of the narrative to a colleague, which has a distancing effect.  After-the-fact recitations of past events (either in the form of an old text or a subsidiary character’s recollections) generally represented the sole concession to normalcy in what Stephen King has termed the “Old Dark Castle School” of pre-1950s horror/fantasy fiction.  Here, though, the device serves another purpose, as it allows the narrator to provide an explanation for the seemingly miraculous events.

Yes, this novel has a last page twist that explains away the supernatural business, and does so in a throwaway (as in a single sentence) and not entirely plausible manner.  For that reason I’m opposed to the finale (it’s the major explanation, I’d opine, that MAN WITH FOUR LIVES isn’t more widely known), in addition to the fact that, simply, I like my supernatural horror stories to remain in the realm of the supernatural.