Mrs Amworth by E.F. Benson

 POSSIBLE SPOILERS

“Railway strikes which agitate the country so much leave us undisturbed because most of the inhabitants of Maxley never leave it at all.”

This is the  famous horror fiction about the over-cheery, pushy woman called Mrs Amworth coming, fresh from India, into the neighbourhood  of Maxley and her befriending, over games of piquet, the male narrator and another neighbour who happens to be a man after my own heart who said these words below as part of his open-minded views on such things as the paranormal and even more specifically on the legend of vampires … 

“I felt that I could be of more use by setting out without compass or knapsack into the mists than by sitting in a cage like a canary and chirping about what was known. Besides, teaching is very bad for a man who knows himself only to be a learner: you only need to be a self-conceited ass to teach.”

…and this applies to me, equally pretentiously, regarding  the preternaturality of the literary gestalt!

And, so, it seems significant  that I chose to read this story today after I saw it mentioned on the ‘Vault’ forum because the story itself seems to have not only our current railway strikes in mind, as quoted above,  but also the relentlessly hot weather! ….

“The summer was unreasonably hot and rainless, and Maxley suffered much from drought, and also from a plague of big black night-flying gnats, the bite of which was very irritating and virulent.”

 …and those bites seem to resonates with the PIQUET!

There are some striking passages that mark this story out as a horror classic, these being just two examples…

“‘You are never so fresh as when you have been grubbing in the soil—black hands, black nails, and boots covered with mud.‘ She gave her great jovial laugh. ‘I’m a glutton for air and earth,’ she said. ‘Positively I look forward to death, for then I shall be buried and have the kind earth all round me.’”

“Then the panic came upon me in full blast; here was I suffocating in the airless room, and whichever window I opened Mrs. Amworth’s face would float in,… “

And at the climax, was she wishfully imitating the missing trains? —

“…from those red lips came one long, appalling cry, swelling up like some hooting…”

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My other reviews of disconnected horrors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/