1952
This publication by Biblioasis designed and decorated by Seth in 2019
My previous review of this author’s BREAKING POINT collection: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/the-breaking-point-stories-by-daphne-du-maurier/
My other reviews of classic or older books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
“It followed him, bump . . . bump . . . down the steps of the terrace.”
Only two bumps, until we realise the inevitable third bump is that of this story’s man himself, his leg bent backwards away from its foot. And the apple tree’s own hand crept towards him in the snow. Without an arm to send it? Just with an applewood yawn and stenchy waft, as well as an ironic buzz, I guess, to mock any modern, as yet uninvented, saw for common man to use, a saw that wouldn’t have snagged horribly on the bark with the similar stuttering uncertainty of early 1950s ‘central heating’, I guess.
Full of sagging bile and foully over-generous apple blossom, and apples with horribly mushy flesh, as apple tree is pitted against apple tree, symbolic of his once land girl sweetheart and his stifling wife.
All three of them dead.
Not a cosy Ghost story for Christmas, at all. A ghost story, though, nevertheless. Artfully laughing at the illustrative artwork made to decorate its words. A dark ghost story, one that pollutes and stifles any festivity, revolting against any chirpiness of the book that had been intended to complement it. With only a few earlier glimpses of happiness on a trip to Italy and in the Green Man pub. Darkness only works at its fullest and most endless slow-motion harvesting of itself when it has a tiny crop of hopes glinting within such darkness. And a ladder, of course, to try reach them.