Product Description

'The great oaken gate heaved and splintered, and a monstrous beast as huge as a horse appeared at the mouth of the den; his small head was laid back on his hairy shoulders, his little eyes gleamed wickedly, and his red mouth opened snarling fiercely'. Undeservedly, the weird and chilling ghost stories of Arthur Christopher Benson and Robert Hugh Benson have been neglected for far too long. This volume attempts to rectify that situation. This dark banquet of tales take us to strange, unworldly and often archaic environments, far removed from the manic pace and pressures of the twenty-first century, but as exercises in the art of luring the reader into a state of unease, they are as potent as they were when the ink was barely dry on the page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88081 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Diverting but less than the sum of its parts
I agree with `Good Book Fan' that AC is preferable to RH. But although AC's stories are quite effective individually they are highly repetitive - again and again we heard about haunted or unlucky buildings or places, men who were irresistibly tempted to pry into their secrets, strange goat-like beasts and (usually) last minute rescues/redemptions.

My favourite tale was `The Uttermost Farthing' and I wondered whether A C Benson had based his hero, Bendyshe, on Henry James (with whom he was acquainted) as the account of Bendyshe's house and habits reminded me strongly of contemporary accounts of Henry James at Lamb House in Rye.

The idea behind `The Traveller' was ingenious but the best tale by RH was, I thought, the atmospheric and mysterious `The Blood-Eagle'. To sum up, this isn't a bad collection but there are plenty of better uncanny stories from the period - the Kipling volume in the same Wordsworth series is really outstanding, for example.

A.C. not R.H.
Any short story collection is going to have stories of varying quality, but this collection takes it to extremes- it is a book of two halves. The first half by A.C Benson is consistently good with tales from different eras- Roman, Medieval to the then modern. "Basil Netherby" and "The Uttermost Farthing" are particularly effective, in the classic English ghost story tradition. Up to this point I greatly enjoyed the book. Unfortunatley, R.H. Benson's stories didn't work for me. The writer seemed more interested in his religous convictions than telling a good story and the stories themselves, were conventional and uninspiring with only "The Traveller" and the "The Watcher" rising above the general level.
I would rate the first half as well worth four stars; the second two stars, so I'll compromise with three stars for the whole book. Enjoy A.C. and endure R.H.