The Plattner Story, and Others — Reading Companion

Evidence and Its Limits

Wells repeatedly frames his most outlandish events through the language of testimony and doubt. In “The Plattner Story,” the narrator insists he is telling the story “without further comment” after listing reasons to disbelieve it. The result is a paradox: the more carefully he hedges, the more the reader is drawn into the puzzle. A similar tactic appears in “The Red Room,” where a young man’s rational confidence is dismantled by an unseen presence. The story never names the haunting; it simply records his growing terror through short, breathless sentences. Wells uses this technique to make the impossible feel like a problem of evidence rather than a flight of fancy.

Violence Without Resolution

Several stories end with an act of violence that solves nothing. In “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” the protagonist has a witch doctor killed, but the severed head continues to glare at him “upside down, but glaring hard.” The head rolls into a corner, is kicked, and still returns to the same position. Pollock’s attempt to buy his way out of a curse only tightens it. “The Cone” builds toward a murder that is both brutal and strangely clinical, described with the same detached precision Wells applies to a geological formation. These endings refuse catharsis; they leave the reader with an image that lingers because it is not explained away.

Small Details That Unsettle

Wells often grounds his fantastic premises in tiny, physical observations. Plattner’s face is “not absolutely symmetrical, his right eye a little larger than the left.” The narrator of “The Plattner Story” notes this as if it might be a clue, but it never becomes one—it simply makes Plattner more real. In “The Argonauts of the Air,” the description of a flying machine focuses on its “wheels and springs and screws” rather than its grandeur. Even in the most supernatural tales, Wells keeps his eye on the material world: the red ants that swarm after a curse, the greasy cards in a gambler’s hands, the way a head rolls and stops “in the same position as before.” These details create a texture of reality against which the impossible stands out sharply.

Readers coming to this collection from Wells’s better-known novels will find a writer still experimenting with tone and length. The stories vary widely—some are tight horror vignettes, others are comic sketches or moral fables—but the best of them share a method: start with a concrete, often mundane detail, then let the strangeness emerge slowly. Pay attention to what the narrators choose to tell you and what they leave out; the gaps are often where the real story lives.

Reading The Plattner Story reminded me of the air after a storm in my childhood home, that strange, charged stillness. It’s the same feeling I get re-remembering The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance — Edition Insights, where the ordinary suddenly holds a curious, quiet menace. Both linger less as plots and more as vivid, unsettling moods I keep returning to.