With over 600 pages of short stories, this was almost the only thing I read in September. Even if I had read more books, this might still be a pick. So many great stories by European & North American authors known (thanks to the 1001-Books list!) and quite a few new to me as well.
#12Booksof2024 @Andrew65
My ten favorite books of 2024. Number 4.
#2024Top10
pickI thought Hadley is not for me,then I listened to the most recent The New Yorker Fiction Podcast: Savaş reads& discusses Hadley‘s An Abduction & her thoughts on Hadley‘s writing, in particular what happens inside of her characters made me want to read her again. I picked up this short story collection & am still not getting the genius of After the funeral which I had first read in the New Yorker but I loved Old Friends, Mia & My mother‘s wedding.
pickThis was a low pick for me. Bourdouxhe was a writer in France prior to and after WWII. Most of these stories focus on the experience of women around this time. I found there were a few stories that really grabbed my interest, and a few that didn‘t (not unlike a lot of short story collections). I am really enjoying diversifying and reading more in translation and non-contemporary works.
pickNot all of the stories were 5 ⭐, but those that were were *so* 5⭐ that I've no hesitation in giving a maximum rating to the collection as a whole.
Blackwood's ability to evoke a liminal sense of something other impinging on the ordinary is wonderful, and this overlay of one reality with another is probably most fully developed in the classic "Ancient Sorceries", but is evident throughout in degrees. ⬇️
pick"The Occupant of the Room" is one of the shorter stories in this collection, so Blackwood doesn't mince words on poetic descriptions of the Swiss Alps or the quaint mountain village hotel, he just gets on with making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and with sending shivers down the spine ?
Featuring an otherworldly wardrobe, but, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Narnia anymore!"
CWs in comment.
"Fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge."
- The Occupant of the Room
When will people in ghost stories realise that they should avoid the fortuitous turn of events that must surely end in terror?!
I'm at the start of the story, but I'd definitely advise Minturn, a tourist in the Swiss Alps, not to accept the hotel room of the woman who went missing in the mountains a couple of days previously, whose return is surely inevitable, alive or dead! ?
"Through the confusion upon his faculties, rose a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies twilight on an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past."
- The Tryst
pickIt took me a while to get through "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". It's a slow paced novella that I found rewarded my patience with it. There's an initial section focusing on the eponymous man, a retired forester whose cottage on the edge of the New Forest allows him access to the trees he loves, and which come to love him in turn with an inhuman jealousy that threatens to possess and subsume him into themselves.
⬇️
