“It seems to me sometimes as if I actually assist in evoking and materialising these appearances, that I help to establish a connection between them…”
Modest though I think I am, I do sometimes have an inexplicable knack to evoke the same effects when entering story texts that I happen to choose to real-time review, the same as Lander does when he dares to enter haunted houses. The fact that he is said also to be a novelist is neither here nor there, I guess!
Ignoring all that for a moment I was genuinely terrified by this brief story, perhaps more than any other, particularly when encountering its two undoubtedly crucial ‘elbow’ moments, after having been justifiably obsessed with elbows as triggers in literature for the last year or so in my real-time reviewing.
The story itself is well-written, atmospheric, about this house that is purported to be both ‘malevolent’ and ‘fatal’, and Lander — who has avoided entering it to date for fear of his own aforementioned ‘skills’ — is tempted to take Jim Brinton, at the latter’s request, to view it briefly just after dark on a foggy day, a day which they had earlier spent playing golf. I shall leave it there!
But I now wonder, as an aside, who or what tempted me into reading August Heat by W.F. Harvey a few days ago, a story that I had somehow instinctively avoided till then!
“Concentrate on NOT concentrating.”
***
My reviews of separate older horror stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
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