Ruth Manning-Sanders' horror novel

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Answer time! The novel that was the subject of a trivia question in Friday's post was 1930's The Crochet Woman, by none other than Ruth Manning-Sanders. No one guessed right. In fact, no one guessed at all. That may be due to only a couple of people stumbling upon the post. But I digress.

The Crochet Woman, published by Coward-McCann, features as its antagonist the titular and witchlike Crochet Woman. As the dust jacket states, she "works with gossip and innuendo in place of curses and spells. Knotting hatred of youth into her endless pattern, she bestirs herself to bring havoc into the lives of her young neighbors."

Manning-Sanders' opening passage describes her monstrous visage: her evil eyes, "tightly drawn-in mouth," and pinched nose — "all the rest of her face was pink withered flesh with downy white hairs on it."

Beyond the opening passage pictured Friday, we know that the Crochet Woman (she has no name) is a bad person because she spews hateful language toward others — language you would not read in Manning-Sanders' later fairy tale collections for children:

" 'She has a hole in her stocking — the slut,' said the crochet woman, though Betty was still too far off for even a large hole to be seen by those light-colored, watching eyes."

Now, it's my understanding that "slut" wasn't quite the socially unacceptable vulgarity in 1930 that it is today. But it was still a very rude insult. And it's a bit jarring to see it in a book by Manning-Sanders!

Later in the novel we get a bit of flashback to the crochet woman's younger days...

"The crochet woman stood watching and listening. Suddenly thirty-eight years, that were thirty-eight gray-colored and hissing snakes, glided backward over the road, and there was the young crochet woman, in her veil and her orange blossom, stepping out of the church. She had caught her man, caught him by the neat lie that no virgin (for all her orange blossom) might invent, and her feet in their white shoes walked niminy piminy, niminy piminy, down the path between the graves, and her hand gripped the arm of Jan's grandfather as if what she had caught she would hold forever more; and her heart swelled with a malicious pride."

I'm exaggerating a bit in calling this horror, of course. But it's by turns creepy and tragic. All that "gossip and innuendo" mentioned on the dust jacket has the effect of turning happy lives heartbreakingly upside-down. (It might have made for a great Gene Tierney movie.) This comes toward the end:

  " 'Here ... you get out,' said Mounster.

  " 'I will in a minute,' said the crochet woman. 'but I'll tell you first who broke your heart, if it was my last word.'

  " 'I'm not curious,' said Mounster.

  " 'I broke it,' said the crochet woman; and her splatted eye glowed like a new risen star. 'I told Betty about you, and you about Betty; every time you quarreled 'twas I sowed the seed; 'twas I told Betty you'd wed her for a warming-pan; I told her about Lucy Tregeer and Alice Tranter; I turned her baby into a pigsy for her; 'twas I told you of what that Robert was up to every time your back was turned ...'

  "Since she wouldn't go out, the Mounster picked her up and carried her, but she didn't struggle or object, justly stayed stiffly in his arms like a wizened doll, with her shiny black boots dangling, and she went on talking at him in her soft malicious voice."

There's a happy ending a few dozen pages later, though. And the crochet woman must live, in her old and wretched body and mind, with the reality that her nefarious plan did not succeed. Just like all those pouting, defeated villains in the fairy tales that Manning-Sanders would tell in the following half-century.

That's as close as Stubby the black cat wanted to get to the Crochet Woman. By the way, the name at the bottom of that wonderful dust jacket illustration is Elizabeth Cale Toeker (or Toeken?). I can't find a single thing about her online. We have a history mystery on our hands!