The Waiting Room by Stephen Volk

I did not want to miss the opportunity of sampling, for potential readers, a story recently published in THIS new acclaimed book collection by Stephen Volk, sampling it as part of what I call my ongoing ‘Dessemination’ project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=Volk&submit=Search

***.

“An author is not bound by legal contract to believe what he writes. We would all be the poorer if he were. Therein lies the task, as I see it. To make the downright impossible feel, if for but a minute, for a page—for a book—more real than the world at the reader’s elbow.”

And alongside that significant elbow moment (and two other elbow moments in it),  the author makes the ‘downright impossible feel’ as real as the story’s summoning of Charles Dickens, as he once summoned for me Peter Cushing and Alfred Hitchcock. Summoning, too, a gestalt from a tessellation  of coincidences, and stories within other frame stories and ghostly echoes of Dickens’ Signalman —  as we grapple with the narrative painter and Dickens himself in a conundrum of plagiarism between a painting of a woman and an already printed story,  and the poignant secrets thus revealed. A ghost story for ghost story lovers.