Ringing the Changes (audio drama)

Originally published in 1955 in Lady Cynthia Asquith's anthology 'The Third Ghost Book' and subsequently housed in 'Dark Entries', the first of Robert Aickman's own collections, 'Ringing the Changes', is a quintessential example of his mastery of the strange tale.

Honeymooning couple Gerald and Phrynne Banstead visit the out of season seaside town of Holihaven only to have their senses assaulted by the constant ringing of the church bells and the stench they experience during an evening walk on a dark beach and despite the warning that the bells are "ringing to wake dead" the couple, foolishly, opt to stay.

This dramatisation for Radio 4 from 2000 by Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss - who also collaborated on a short film adaptation of 'The Cicerones' - features the stellar cast of George Baker and Fiona Allen in the lead roles, ably supported by Michael Cochrane and Hammer legend Barbara Shelley.

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The Unsettled Dust

Robert Aickman
Faber & Faber

Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories where strange things happen that the reader is unable to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged but all have the same thing in common - they are all brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our peace of mind actually is.
'The Next Glade', 'Bind Your Hair' and 'The Stains' appeared together in The Wine-Dark Sea in 1988 while 'The Unsettled Dust', 'The House of the Russians', 'No Stronger Than a Flower', 'The Cicerones' and 'Ravissante' first appeared in Sub Rosa in 1968. The stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990. Aickman received the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for 'The Stains', which had first appeared in the anthology New Terrors (1980), before appearing in the last original posthumous collection of Aickman's short stories, Night Voices (1985).

'The Unsettled Dust' was a posthumous collection released some 9 years after the authors death.  The stories included all bear Aickman's characteristic strangeness which can result  in them being equal parts frustrating and enthralling.
The opening - titular - tale is an almost straightforward (by Aickman's standards) and old fashioned  haunted house tale as a representative of a trust is subjected to the dubious hospitality of two sisters in their dusty old house in a quietly sad tale of family, pride and unreconciled loss, themes that are echoed in 'The Houses of the Russians', an intriguing little tale of an island of abandoned homes and the memories they hold of  their former inhabitants.

'No Stronger Than A Flower' was the first Aickman tale I ever read and this story of a woman's metamorphosis loses none of it's brutal power in a reread several years on and with a wider knowledge of what to expect - that is if one can even remotely 'expect' anything in an Aickman story.

'The Cicerones' is another story I was familiar with, this time through the adaptation made by Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson - watch it here.   I'm not particularly enamoured of it but I was struck by how closely the filmed version stuck to the text.

'The Next Glade' is another story that I found somewhat uninspiring.  Unusually for Aickman the strangeness here felt contrived and a little but forced.  I can't put my finger on anything in particular about it but for me it failed to gel and the story was both dull and flat.

Things get very much back on track with 'Ravissante' as we're shown into a world that is both mannered and deeply strange filled with simmering sexual repression and denied release and the folk horror duo of 'Bind Your Hair', another beautifully ambiguous enigma of rural weirdness and the book's award winning closing tale, 'The Stains', a story of love lost, love found, family, responsibility, innocence and lichen which sees about as Aickmanesque an ending to to this write-up as I'm going to come up with.

Buy it here -  The Unsettled Dust

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The Cicerones

This short film by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson is an adaption of one of Robert Aickman's 'strange stories' and tells of a traveller's encounters with four 'cicerones' (guides) inside a cathedral.

Mark Gatiss takes the lead role as 'John Trant' a reserved and slightly stuffy Englishman of indeterminate age sightseeing his way across Europe who, in the great ghostly tradition of M. R. James, goes off in search of a  MacGuffin - in this case a painting of Lazarus - and instead finds himself at the centre of a much more unsettling experience among the columns and crypts of 'The Cathedral of Saint Bavon'. 

At only twelve minutes in length Dyson has mostly kept true to his source and this is a concentrated dose of Aickman ambiguity as we, along with Trant, are led deeper and deeper into the bowels of the cathedral as the tension builds from no overt source other than Trant's desperate need to find the painting before the cathedral closes, the macabre nature of the images he is confronted with and his reactions to the odd behaviour of the various people he meets.  As is the way of things with Aickman little is obvious, much goes unsaid and one is left very much adrift in exquisitely disquieting confusion.

If you wish to learn more about this most singular of authors you can find an interesting documentary about his life and work at this link and another (longer) adaptation of one of his strange stories - 'The Hospice' by clicking here.

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Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales

Created by R.B. Russell and Rosalie Parker of Tartarus Press who have been responsible for championing and republishing Aickman's work this is a fascinating documentary of the life and work of a particularly enigmatic author.  With contributions from friends and fans - such as The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson and author and playwright Reggie Oliver - it tells of his writing, his wider involvement in the arts and his work preserving the canalways of Britain and gives many fascinating insights into the life of this most compelling of writers.




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The Hospice

Robert Aickman was an English writer of  'strange stories' (his term) of which he wrote some 48 that have been collected and reissued most recently by Tartarus Press and Faber & Faber.

Taken from the collection 'Cold Hand In Mine', 'The Hospice' is a deeply unsettling tale of a man stumbling into a situation that he cannot understand when lack of petrol and an inexplicable animal attack lead him to seek refuge in a remote building offering "Good food, some accommodation".

Screened as part of an obscure, late eighties HTV West anthology series called 'Night Voices', The Hospice is a bold and I think mostly successful attempt to film one of Aickman's more inscrutable stories.  The director, Dominique Othenin-Girard (who went on to make Halloween 5 and Omen IV) makes some clunky decisions (the moving statue @1:15) but he creates an uneasy atmosphere characterised by the gurgling radiators of the overheated building, the amorphous creaks and squelches reminiscent of the digesting of the massive portions of food served at dinner and the discordant musical score alternating between ethereal voices and avant garde jazz stabs.  The enigmatic nature of Aickman's story is maintained but in the more blatant world of film and stripped of the elegant obfuscation of the author's prose we are given a far more blatant indication of intent and meaning than in the original.  In the lead role Jack Shepherd (now far more widely known as Wycliffe) is excellent as Maybury as are Alan Dobie (as Hospice maitre d, Falkner) and Jonathan Cecil (as his unexpected room mate, Mr. Bannard) but Marthe Keller is given little to do as Cecille.

This is a story that resides more fully in the weird than in the supernatural it sits more easily alongside Kafka, The Twilight Zone or the works of David Lynch than it does M.R. James or Algernon Blackwood.  It is a phantasmagoric fever dream that drags you into a world both seductive and unpleasant with little justification offered or resolution provided.



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The Wine-Dark Sea

Robert Aickman
Faber and Faber

Peter Straub called Robert Aickman 'this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories'. Aickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term for them) are a subtle exploration of psychological displacement and paranoia. His characters are ordinary people that are gradually drawn into the darker recesses of their own minds.
First published in the USA in 1988 and in the UK in 1990 The Wine-Dark Sea contains eight stories that will leave the reader unsettled as the protagonists' fears and desires, at once illogical and terrifying, culminate in a disturbing yet enigmatic ending.

Over the last few years I've read a fair few of Aickman's strange tales both in the wild as part of various anthologies and caged inside the first two volumes of this quartet of reissues, 'Dark Entries' and 'Cold Hand in Mine'.  They've been an enjoyable if often slightly frustrating read.  he was a craftsman par excellence, his skill in building a story into an oppressive and bizarre atmosphere is astounding  but I've often been left unsatisfied by the conclusions he fashions for them.  I don't mean this in the same way as say Stephen King who simply cannot write a satisfying ending but more as an observation that the almost perfunctory endings he gives the stories cast both us and his characters out into the cold having been utterly changed by the experience we've just shared.

This third collection contains what felt - I've not checked so I may be factually wrong but it certainly felt - like a set of longer and more deliberate stories.  They were, not to put too fine a point on it, excellent.

From the opening paean to a simpler, spiritual experience in the title piece, via the old fashioned, and a little obvious, horror of 'The Trains' , the growing madness of the slavery of the telephone in 'Your Tiny Hand is Frozen' and the silliness of 'Growing Boys'.  Through the isolation of 'The Fetch' and the neglect suffered in 'The Inner Room' and the acceptance and rejection of 'Never Visit Venice' to the insomniacs rambles 'Into the Wood' this proved to be a most satisfying and immersive read and easily the most enjoyable so far of the quartet.

Buy it here - The Wine-Dark Sea

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The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Robert Aickman
Fontana Books

Robert Aickman "Introduction"
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Playing With Fire"
Edith Nesbit "Man-Size in Marble"
Robert Hichens "How Love Came to Professor Guildea"
Elizabeth Bowen "The Demon Lover"
Sir Max Beerbohm "A. V. Laider"
Edgar Allan Poe "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"
Lord Dunsany "Our Distant Cousins"
Robert Aickman "The Inner Room"
Perceval Landon "Thurnley Abbey"
John Metcalfe "Nightmare Jack"
Ambrose Bierce "The Damned Thing"
Edith Wharton "Afterward"

It's been a while since I stuck my head into one of these Fontana anthologies but tonight I had the craving.

Aickman has put together an admirable collection with only 3 of the 12 stories being of the 'Oh, it's that one again' variety; E. Nesbit's 'Man Size in Marble', Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Demon Lover' and Edith Wharton's 'Afterward'. All great tales and all solid choices but one's I've become very accustomed to skipping past.

Lord Dunsany

A few of the stories here proved to be an absolute delight; Conan Doyle's 'Playing With Fire' with it's cautionary tale of reaching beyond ones abilities, Robert Hichens' superbly crafted 'How Love Came To Professor Guildea' and Aickman's own supremely creepy 'The Inner Room' are all deliciously bewitching,

A few others, such as Lord Dunsany's 'Our Distant Cousins', with it's odd little scfi-fi tale very much in the spirit of both Wells' 'Time Machine' and C.S. Lewis' 'Out of the Silent Planet', and Poe's 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' provided an enjoyable distraction. Whilst others like Sir Max Beerbohm's 'A.V. Laider', Perceval Landon's ghostly 'Thurnley Abbey', John Metcalfe's almost Sherlockian 'Nightmare Jack' and Ambrose Bierce's 'The Damned Thing' filled both time and pages without too much complaint or distraction.

As with the other volume - I have them all here but am eking them out - Aickman proves himself the consummate anthologist. Each story, even the ones I didn't overly enjoy felt as though they belonged, as though they were at home in the collection and it proved for the most part to be a hugely enjoyable read.

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Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories

Penguin Books

Who better to investigate the literary spirit world than that supreme connoisseur of the unexpected, Roald Dahl? Of the many permutations of the macabre, Dahl was always especially fascinated by the classic ghost story. For this superbly disquieting collection, he selected fourteen of his favorite tales by such authors as E.F. Benson, Rosemary Timperley, and Edith Wharton.

In his introduction to this collection Dahl makes a big thing about how he read 749 ghost stories and had only found 32 that he deemed to be any good; of those he includes 14 here. One of them, 'Playmates' by A.M. Burrage, is my favourite of all the ghostly tales I've read over the years and a few of them - Robert Aickman's 'Ringing the Changes', Edith Wharton's 'Afterward' and Marion Crawford's 'The Upper Berth' - are staples of these sort of books. Of the rest they can best be described as a tepid selection.

A.M. Burrage

Of these remaining stories a couple such as L.P. Hartley's 'W.S.', Rosemary Timperley's 'Harry' and Cynthia Asquith's 'The Corner Shop' have a flavour of those 'unexpected tales' that Dahl himself was famous for. A few such, such as the ever readable J. Sheridan le Fanu's 'The Ghost of a Hand' are a little cliché or lovely but a little bit twee like Timperley's other tale 'Christmas Meeting'. Some are just bad - 'Elias and the Draug' by Jonas Lie and 'The Telephone' by Mary Treadgold - and a couple proved to be a delightful surprise - E.F. Benson's 'In The Tube' and A.M. Burrage's 'The Sweeper'.

It must be said I was expecting more from this collection. I thought a writer like Dahl would be able to assemble a collection to beat all others but this one rarely seemed to sparkle and was often a bit of a chore. It did serve to remind me though that what I really need to do is more fully explore the writing of A.M. Burrage.

Buy it here:  Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories

Cold Hand In Mine

Robert Aickman
Faber & Faber

Cold Hand in Mine was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977. The story 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' won the Aickman World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.
Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ('Pages from a Young Girl's Journal') but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.

I very much enjoyed the first volume of these Faber reprints of Aickman's collections of short stories.  The stories are decidedly odd and often end with only the vaguest of resolutions which is kind of fun.  This second collection, featuring stories originally published in 1975, is very much more of the same but with the strangeness knob turned way up.

The book opens with 'The Swords' a dark and disturbing story of a young salesman's sexual awakening in the company of an odd young woman from a carnival sideshow.  It's eroticised body horror at it's most disquieting mixing potential metaphor - the men at the sideshow piercing the woman's body with their swords - with the virgin narrators own confused, tumbling, feelings of arousal, confusion and (self)loathing at the situation he finds himself in.

'The Real Road to the Church', 'Niemandswasser', 'Pages From a Young Girl's Journal' and 'The Hospice'  all tell of people out of place.  In the first a young lady relocates herself to a small cottage and has to negotiate the ways of the locals and perhaps losing - or at least putting aside - an aspect of herself.  In the second a self absorbed prince removes himself from the world imposing himself in a part of his world where he previously hadn't belonged and through his arrogance finds himself both literally and metaphorically in the no man's water of the title.  The third is perhaps the story here I found the least satisfying as it tells of a young girl's visit to Europe in the company of her parents and the slow descent into the thrall of a vampire.  Unfortunately she's such a whiney little Anne Rice type that by the end I just didn't care.  The fourth was a much more interesting prospect as another fairly repressed man finds himself stranded for the night at a very unusual hospice where the guests are fed huge quantities of food whilst chained to the table and change their appearance during the night.  It's very much proto-David Lynch and utterly wonderful.

More fun is had with the relatively straight forward weird fiction delights of 'The Same Dog' whose appearance precipitates the death of a young girl  and whose reappearance comes allied with a profound shock.

'Meeting Mr. Millar' is an unusual - and perhaps slightly overlong - ghost story where another of Aickman's characteristically conservative leads is disturbed from his comfortable routine by the comings and goings of the new neighbours downstairs.

The book ends with 'The Clock Watcher', the story of a young wife's obsession with the elaborate clocks of her homeland and of her husband's increasing unease with her and them.  It's a story brimming with potential but unfortunately, for me at least, it never truly found its stride and just didn't achieve any notable level of intrigue or enigma.

I have to admit here that I struggled to find my rhythm with this book but I suspect that was mostly due to the distraction of work pressures.  There are some fun stories here and a few very enjoyable moments but it just didn't hit as immediately as the first volume.  It is however still a very pleasurable trip into a unique imagination. 

Buy it here - Cold Hand in Mine

Dark Entries

Robert Aickman
Faber & Faber

Aickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term) are constructed immaculately, the neuroses of his characters painted in subtle shades. He builds dread by the steady accrual of realistic detail, until the reader realises that the protagonist is heading towards their doom as if in a dream.
Dark Entries was first published in 1964 and contains six curious and macabre stories of love, death and the supernatural, including the classic story 'Ringing the Changes'.

So, after reading a few short stories and him as the editor of a Fontana anthology I finally get to experience Aickman on his own terms.  'Dark Entries' is one of four newly reprinted collections by Faber & Faber and is the earliest of the works and so the perfect place to start.

The first Aickman story I read is featured here but first we have a biographical foreword before the book properly begins with 'The School Friend'.  The story tells of the unlikely friendship between two women who find themselves thrown back together after many years only for one of them to find that people are stranger by far than the face they present to the world.

The second story is, in the words of the jacket blurb, 'the classic story 'Ringing in the Changes' which is the only story presented here that I'm already familiar with.  It's a brutal and harrowing story that pits a newly married couple against the risen dead in a small coastal town.

Truthfully I have no idea what to make of 'Choice of Weapons'.  For much of it it seems like a straight forward love story until the ending spins everything on it's head and left me a tad confused.

This oddity is followed by probably the most straightforward story in the book in the shape of a haunted railway station in 'The Waiting Room' before the book once more earns its 'strange stories' label with 'The View'.  Here whilst taking refuge on an island a man finds solace in the arms and house of a beautiful woman but in a place where change is constant he finds it hard to do so.

With the exception of a short remembrance of Aickman by Ramsey Campbell the book ends with the folk horror of 'Bind Your Hair' that places a newly engaged career woman amidst her fiances country family and the very odd and unpleasant goings-on up on the hill; a story I felt could have benefited greatly from being given far more space in the telling.

I really didn't know what to expect of these books.  Having read about him and having read two of his stories I was pretty certain I was going to get an old fashioned kind of strangeness and I wasn't disappointed on that score as it was strange to the nth degree.  'Dark Entries' proved to be a most diverting read and I'm very much looking forward to the others.

Buy it here -  Dark Entries

The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Robert Aickman (ed)
Fontana Books

After finally getting to read some stories by Aickman, who over the last year had climbed to the top of my list of authors I wanted to track down, I noticed on my shelf this anthology of stories chosen by him.  It's the only one of the Fontana series I've managed to track down so far and it's a real delight.

For Aickman 'The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives form to the unanswerable' and that key aspect of the unknown and mysterious is what guides the choice of stories.  There are few answers here and resolutions are often ephemeral.

Opening the book is 'The Accident' by Ann Bridge.  The pseudonymous Bridge was an avid mountain climber and her story reflects this as a psychiatrist attempts to help a young brother and sister menaced by sinister letters and footprints in the snow.  It's an attractive premise but one which is hampered by Bridge's
love of climbing and so much of the suspense becomes lost in the descriptions of the activity.

Barry Pain's 'Not On The Passenger List' is one in a long line of ocean traversing ghost stories. Here a widow on her way to England is haunted by a ghost that, unusually, is also seen by other passengers.  the story is told by another traveller and whilst not played for laughs has a lightness to it that indicates, to me at least, an author more at home with a more frivolous story style.

Oscar Wilde

The great Oscar Wilde is represented by a story called 'The Sphinx Without a Secret' wherein two men discuss a recent doomed romance and the enigmatic lady at the centre of it.  It is the most sparse of tales with the entire story revolving around the ladies behaviour and the endless connotations implied by the ambiguity of the ending.

The American writer (and friend of Wilde) Vincent O'Sullivan offers a fairly inconsequential but amusingly macabre little story of a belligerent ghost in denial of his own death in 'When I Was Dead' before we are provided with a translation of Alexander Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades' that reveals itself at the last to be an amusing tale of spectral revenge rather than a fairly typical tale of avaricious behaviour within the Russian nobility.

Whilst more renowned as a critic Desmond MacCarthy's 'Pargiton and Harby' shows him to have had a keen predilection for the weird as his tale of a man haunted by an event in his past reveals itself to be far more interesting than it's premise.

Hugh Walpole

Whilst we're on the subject of the weird Hugh Walpole's 'The Snow' is a brief, fiery examination of a marriage in tumultuous decline as the husband's placidity and the young wife's irascibility clash irrevocably in the shadow of his dead wife's memory.

I can find very little information regarding the author of the next story, Eric Ambrose, other than that he was English and his from and to dates.  His story, 'Carlton's Father', written in 1936 is a fabulous piece of proto-steampunk that any attempt to explain would spoil so onto the next which is by the peerless M.R. James.

'A School Story' is one of the fastest moving of James' tales with a rapidity of telling that takes it's tempo from the narrators bewildered retelling of the events surrounding the disappearance of a teacher.  It isn't one of James' most involved tales and the ending goes a bit too far but it's always fun to dip into any of James' works.

I've read a few of Saki's stories over the last couple of years and they're usually enjoyable but they've never grabbed me as much as some of his contemporaries.  His story here, 'The Wolves of Cernogratz'  is a rather gentle and poignant tale of the return to the ancestral home by the last of the von Cernogratz family.

Wilkie Collins

The book ends with the William Wilkie Collins novella, 'Mad Monkton'.  This wonderful tale by friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens tells of one man's attempt to avoid both the family curse and the family prophecy as he searches for the body of his dead uncle.  I've read a couple of Collins' stories before this and have been hugely impressed each time and this was the best of them all.  I find his way with words to be eminently readable and his imagination beguiling.

I picked up this book expecting to be entertained for a weekend and instead was treated to a number of old favourites alongside a number of intriguing authors whose work I was unaware of and who were of such a level of obscurity that it would have been no effort for me to have remained ignorant of them.

An excellent and extraordinary collection that explores the fantastical and the macabre in the most imaginative and enjoyable way.

The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories

Christine Bernard
Fontana Books

I jumped on this book when I saw it in a cluttered second hand bookshop in Cheltenham because of the Nigel Kneale story that I hadn't read before; I'd have bought it anyway but that was the clincher.  There were a few other firsts in there too so let's take it one story at a time.

Starting things off is 'The Squaw' by Bram Stoker and it's tale of feline revenge as a rather stupid American tourist is given a medieval comeuppance by a particularly angry she-cat.  I've only ever read one Stoker tale before - 'The Judge's House' - which I really enjoyed and this one was fun also.  I really must get around to reading that copy of Dracula that's sitting on my bookshelf.

Next is only me second experience of Robert Aickman.  I'd managed to entirely miss him and now I've read him in two books in a row - 'Ringing the Changes' in '65 Great Tales of the Supernatural'.  'No Stronger Than a Flower' is a quietly odd little tale of newly weds that sees the wife relenting to her new husbands comments regarding her appearance in a most odd and unpleasant way.

Hugh Walpole

Hugh Walpole's excellent 'Tarnhelm' was one of three familiar stories here as a young boy is sent to stay with his two uncles only to discover that there's something quite unlikeable about one of them and he finds himself in serious danger.

The fourth story gives me my first chance to read an Agatha Christie story, 'The Gypsy' is a light but gratifying tale of premonition, fate and love wrapped up in a breakneck read that still manages to feel complete and satisfying.

Another anthology regular, Algernon Blackwood's 'A Case of  Eavesdropping', takes a young man to a boarding house where bumps (and blood) in the night are commonplace.

And so we arrive at the Nigel Kneale tale.  Kneale only ever published one non Quatermass book, a short story collection called 'Tomato Cain and Other Stories',  and it's from that his haunted house story 'Minuke' is the most anthologised so to get a chance to read another was a real treat.  'The Pond' is a short but sweet tale of revenge on a strange old taxidermist.

L.P. Hartley

Roald Dahl provides a tale that is straight out of his 'Tales of the Unexpected' style with a story that mixes a dead husband, his newly liberated wife and some gruesome post-mortem science with the promise of some well savoured revenge.

L.P. Hartley's 'The Two Vaynes' is by far the poorest story here with large plot holes in a fairly pointless plot of revenge for a pretty slight leading to revenge for a larger crime.

The Hartley story is followed by longest piece as Ray Bradbury's 'The Next in Line' tells of a young woman's descent into madness in a small Mexican town.  It's beautifully written but I found it to be quite unsatisfying with a very poor finale.  My preference in a ghostly or weird story is for a British setting - or at the furthest European - so the Bradbury was a step outside my happy place but still an enjoyable excursion as what Bradbury I've read in the past was always very readable as it, mostly, was here.

Frank Baker

Frank Baker's 'In The Steam Room' is notable only for it's narrators long list of possible deaths which do raise a smile but the story itself which sees a middle aged neurotic foresee a violent death inside a sauna is fairly innocuous.

The same can be said of 'The Interlopers' by Saki as two feuding Carpathian lords are trapped together in a deep forest giving them time to sort out their quarrel.

Of the final three stories one proved itself to be stylish but ultimately empty, the second to be slightly pointless and the final one to be an old favourite whose title I didn't recognise.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Cat Jumps' is a haunted house story without any actual ghosts as the new owners and their party guests at a house famous for the gory murder committed there become obsessed and bewitched by it's reputation .  Ambrose Bierce's 'The Boarded Window' continues this theme with a remembrance of the reasons behind a sealed window in a deserted log cabin.

The book ends with Joan Aiken's lovely little twisted tale, 'Marmalade Wine' that finds a walker chancing across the country home of a retired surgeon only for things to go horribly awry.

As I've mentioned in previous reviews I do have a love for these old (this one is 1966) anthologies and this proved to be a most enjoyable one.  The selection is admirably light on ghostly goings on and heavy on supernatural revenge and retribution and is very much worth hunting down for anyone with a love of the weird.