I would consider this a must read for anyone who loved the film Old Dark House, the original 1930s. The film is wonderful but somewhat campy and theatrical, not capturing the language and philosophical moments that make the book a delight. Much that didn't quite make sense in the film does make sense in the book. Together they are perfect. Bravo to Valencourt for bringing this classic back to life--I'm eager to read more Priestley. ( )

2.5 stars

Something just didn't click with me with this story. It seemed to take forever to actually get going despite things happening with the storm quite early on, and I felt let down by the ending. ( )

J. B. Priestley was an extremely popular author in the late 1920s and the 1930s, and when someone told me about Benighted, I had to read it. I love stories about old, scary houses, and this book inspired a 1930s film, "The Old Dark House," which gave birth to a whole genre of movies.

Benighted is the tale of people stranded by a horrendous storm and flooding in a remote corner of Wales. Their place of refuge is an ancient, dark, creepy old manor house inhabited by four of the strangest people you'd never hope to meet. Little do they realize that it will be a severe test of their mental and physical fortitude just to survive the night.

Priestley excelled in his depiction of the ancient house and its inhabitants. There is a decided scare factor when reading about them that I enjoyed. Where the book fell flat for me was in the amount of time it spent inside each of the stranded characters' heads. I can see what Priestley was trying to do: the house had such an effect on these people that their attitudes began to change about what they wanted from their lives, but it was just too much-- especially since I didn't particularly like any of them in the first place. By book's end, there's also a question I'd dearly love to have answered, a question that Priestley really didn't want readers to ask.

Benighted gave me a glimpse of Priestley's talent, but it failed to hit the bulls-eye. ( )

“It seems to me that life demands so much care to be lived at all decently that it’s hardly worth living.”

Blew through this in a fortnight. A nice change of pace after the three-month rally of “Tom Jones”. The speed, however, should be no measure of the depth of this fun yet forgotten satire on the “old dark house” genre. Plenty of elbow room amidst the action for jabs of psychological drama. Plenty of space for pipe smoke to carry the confessions of intrigues, past shames, failed wishes, loves lost in the haze. Sure, it rains the whole damn book, and that could be an all-too-obvious device; except the shadows and creaks and intimations of dark secrets wouldn’t be as compelling. And it is a satire, after all. So, rain on!

The movie captures most of this, adding more emphasis to creepy insinuation, distorted images in mirrors and glass, extreme close-ups of half-glimpsed bestial faces. “The Old Dark House” is James Whale at his inimitably campiest. A parody, itself, to be sure. But I don’t believe it reaches the depth and richness and heartache quite like the book. It is uproarious good fun, though, and it was a treat to revisit this classic after that fortnight of reading to the wife—even if I had to dig through those damn tubs in the attic again to find it.

“It was queer how excited and happy she was inside, simply because the two of them were there talking about strange things and all the time talking their own strangeness away.”

—Benighted by J.B. Priestley ( )

Review upon second reading, 2021:
As a modern gothic novel, Priestley does a pretty good job with "Benighted" in evoking the requisite elements of age, decay, unnatural mental states and palpitating fear. These were the elements I particularly noticed on my first reading in 2013, inspired by my prior exposure to James Whale's classic film adaptation. The quieter moments of relationship between the characters, interesting though they were, felt something of a distraction from the genre-trappings. I realise now that, in the way Priestley used the detective genre in "An Inspector Calls" to examine the English class structure, he was doing a similar thing in "Benighted" through a gothic lens.

Written fewer than ten years after the horrors of the Great War, the old dark house in the wasteland becomes a metaphor of the crumbling decay at the heart of the Empire, storm-battered, assaulted, threatened with annihilation, and occupied by a degenerate aristocracy, represented in the frayed insanity of the Femm household, in equal measure served upon and terrified by the lumpenproletariat that is Morgan, their dumb and brutish manservant.

Priestley brings into this feverish household the Wavertons, a bourgeois married couple, too concerned with appearances to be able to live freely and love each other openly, and their cynical, irreverent acquaintance, Penderel, a traumatised survivor of the trenches subject to sudden bouts of depression. These three are later joined on set by a petty bourgeois provincial who has crawled up the capitalist greasy pole to become as rich as he is greedy, and, representing the working class, his East End chorus-girl escort.

So far, so awful, but in a few short scenes, Priestley exposes his characters flaws, motivations and their tender humanity. They become people as well as allegorical types, and I found myself caring for them all. They're tested together in the crucible of existential horror, all required to put aside pretence and meet each other genuinely.

I didn't warm to what seems to be a patriarchal thread Priestley had woven through the story in using the name 'Femm' for the ruling class presiding over a nation emasculated by war, together with a swipe at male writers of women's books being presented as a sign of an effeminate degeneracy of 'healthy masculinity', nor to instances of ableism and antisemitism.

Those infrequent blemishes aside, the febrile build-up to crisis and aftermath draws to a wearied end which is brilliant in being simultaneously dark, hopeful and ambivalent. There is a poignancy in being able to look back from the vantage of almost a century at the darker horrors about to be unleashed on Priestley's generation, which he had glimpsed and unavailingly warned of.

Review upon first reading, 2013:
I bought this book because I enjoyed the James Whale film adaptation, The Old Dark House. Atmospheric and amusing as the film is, the book (naturally) is better.

There are no gruesome shocks in the way of modern horror but, if you let your imagination put you in the shoes of the lonely travellers who find themselves stranded in the strange old Femm house, it is really creepy and horripilating.

Priestley is able to go inside his characters thoughts and history in much more depth than Whale was able to do, and this is where it steps ahead of the film. Also, the ending is much darker than the Hollywood version (though the introduction to my edition says that Whale shot Priestley's ending, but the studio made him change it).

I read Benighted during a week of Autumnal rains and storms: a perfect read, providing you're safely indoors with a hot cup of tea and a biscuit. ( )