They return at evening A book of ghost storiesHerbert Russell WakefieldOmniClassics · Literature
They return at evening A book of ghost stories
Herbert Russell WakefieldRespectable houses, professional confidence, and familiar routines offer little protection against these returning presences.
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About the book
Wakefield's ten ghost stories place supernatural disturbances among people accustomed to comfortable explanations of their world. In That Dieth Not, a man whose wife's death has been accepted as an accident privately acknowledges a much darker truth. Or Persons Unknown begins with the practical question of hiring a butler whose former employer died mysteriously, making belief in his strange account a test of both judgment and sympathy. Other stories carry the uncanny into railway travel, academic rivalry, and the golf course. The collection often lets a polished voice or orderly social setting establish confidence before undermining it. Haunting becomes especially disquieting where ordinary institutions have failed to discover guilt, recognize suffering, or account for what a witness has experienced.
- Guilt and haunting
- Respectability and concealment
- Limits of skepticism
Why read it
The contrast between civilized manners and the violence beneath them gives the apparitions more than merely atmospheric force.
English Philip Allan & Co. first edition of 1928, containing ten stories