Books Dissecting The Dark Descent All the Pieces Matter: “Afterward” by Edith Wharton By Sam Reader | Published on July 1, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. Edith Wharton is a name that deserves to be invoked far more often, especially in the gothic world. While many know her novella-length character portrait Ethan Frome and her classic novel The Age of Innocence, she was a lifelong fan of ghost stories, even writing several herself while incorporating her knowledge of shifting social mores, class issues, and complex studies of characters into the mix. “Afterward” is perhaps one of her more transfixing written works, a story that uses a more “realistic” approach to its gothic horror to add greater complexity and nuance to this tale of ghosts and karmic retribution. With its introduction of realism and deeper interest in the psychological landscape of its characters, it’s every bit as horrifying and strange as the other tales of the fantastic included in The Dark Descent, but contains enough emotional truth to linger long after its haunting final lines. Relocating from the Midwest, Mary Boyne and her husband move to Dorsetshire, where they plan to live at an old house called Lyng. Cut off from modern conventions such as indoor plumbing and electricity (the Boynes were determined to live in a very old house), Lyng’s distinguishing feature is a ghost that “no one knows is there,” with previous inhabitants only realizing that they’d had a spiritual encounter “long, long afterward.” Despite this disappointing development, the nouveau riche Boynes happily move into Lyng and set about their new life of leisure, Ned Boyne writing a book while Mary paints and takes care of the household. When a strange young man shows up at Lyng and mysteriously vanishes (taking Mr. Boyne along with him), Mary’s hunt for her husband uncovers a series of unnerving secrets about both her husband’s business affairs and the ghost of Lyng, the full extent of which will not be fully revealed until “long, long afterward.” In the moment, people don’t usually process all of what’s happening to them. They know, of course, if something strange is going on or if something feels off. It’s a warning sign that they should pay attention, but most of the time, we don’t piece together the full picture until we’ve had time to process, to genuinely reflect on what felt so weird. In this sort of situation, it’s not until someone starts putting all the pieces together that suddenly the unnerving truth of an odd encounter or a small, weird moment is revealed to them. It’s an effect that’s used frequently in horror—you can set your watch by how many stories or visual works will allow small, sinister details to pile up until the trap is finally sprung—but Wharton’s use here feels more realistic and true to life. Throughout “Afterward,” Mary notices various unusual details, but as they’re small moments, she doesn’t chalk them up to anything in particular. Boyne’s strange behavior can be attributed to a thousand little anxieties—moving to England, starting his book, and at points perhaps even his awareness of Lyng’s mysterious ghost, which Boyne himself might have seen. Boyne always has a handy excuse to explain away everything, from insisting that there’s no merit to his former partner Elwell accusing him of “every crime in the calendar” to claiming the first time he and Mary see the ghost of Lyng, it’s merely the man he wanted to see about the gutters. It’s not stated outright, but the glimpses start to add up. While Mary has no real reason to suspect Boyne of anything, the reader has every reason to suspect, and the way Wharton calls attention to the small details Boyne and Mary dismiss only underlines their sense of wrongness, especially on repeat readings.            It’s a common feature of toxic relationships. The person being harmed or manipulated will attempt to explain away the details that don’t jibe with their vision that everything is all right, because the truth is too psychologically devastating. Even if something is definitely wrong, even if there’s tension and quiet menace, the longer you believe everything is all right, the more likely it will be and the less likely there will be some kind of incident. You find yourself accepting any explanation for the strangeness solely in the hope that doing so will mean that things can go back to normal or return to how they were when they felt good. In Mary’s case, the more she accepts her husband’s rationalizations, the faster she can get back to enjoying life at Lyng, with its secret passages and ghosts. The sense of small details Mary is either ignoring or doesn’t want to directly confront also applies to the oft-discussed ghost of Lyng. Mary’s friend Alida claims that no one knows they’ve seen the ghost until “afterward,” but in the few encounters Mary has with the ghost in the form of Elwell, she first explains away the figure’s indistinct appearance with her nearsightedness, and then when the ghost comes for her husband, notices that “he had an American intonation” but not the accent as well as an indistinct appearance. Mary registers that something weird is going on, but (much in the same way that her husband does with her questions) rationalizes it away as Boyne’s business and not hers. After Elwell’s eventual death, Boyne still keeps her in the dark and Mary internalizes his rationalizations, waking up the morning of his strange disappearance with a sense of “security.” This is, in fact, the thing that ultimately proves Boyne’s undoing. Boyne, keeping his malfeasance secret from Mary and working hard to rationalize everything away, succeeds on making Mary complicit when the ghost finally comes to take him away. There’s something clearly weird about the whole thing, but it’s not until Boyne vanishes without a trace that the key details start to slam home. Wharton’s use of a more “realistic” style of haunting—most true ghost story accounts have the witness only realizing what happened after the person they were talking to walks through a wall or mysteriously vanishes—reinforces the horror, that somehow Mary let the ghost in and unwittingly played a role in dismantling what she (falsely) saw as an idyllic existence. Trying to avoid an incident led the incident directly to their door. Modern readers, of course, know that she had nothing to do with any of this and that Boyne got what was coming to him—he was a shady businessman dragged to the netherworld because he manipulated everyone around him and refused to face the consequences of his actions. Knowing that Mary is better off and feeling that Mary is better off are, however, two different things entirely. It’s here where Wharton’s realism has its harshest sting—the hole torn in the world by the shady, manipulative Mr. Boyne still leaves horror and trauma behind, and even if karmic retribution is just, justice sometimes looks unfathomably cruel to those like Mary who don’t see the complete picture until long, long afterward. And now to turn it over to you. Was your main experience with reading Edith Wharton Ethan Frome, or another work? Do you think Mary will recover from her terrible ordeal now that Boyne has vanished? Does Wharton’s attention to mirroring accounts of “authentic” hauntings heighten or lessen the horror? Please join us in two weeks as we explore an area of singular loneliness with “The Willows,” by Algernon Blackwood.[end-mark] The post All the Pieces Matter: “Afterward” by Edith Wharton appeared first on Reactor.