Couching at the Door

D. K. Broster was best known for writing historical fiction, and one trilogy about Scottish highlanders remained in print nearly to the present day. It was only in the supernatural stories that she showed a darker side. An intensely private person, little is known about her family or life outside of her connection to Oxford, where she attended one of the first lady colleges and worked as a secretary early in her career. When she died in 1950, many readers were surprised to find out that D. K. Broster was female and Engish. This is a great collection of supernatural fiction. I think that the standout was the story set in then newly-discovered French caves with cave paintings. She has a tremendous gift of description--which makes the stories creepier. The horror movie "Carnival of Souls" must have lifted its plot device from "From the Abyss." But the Broster story is more touching, because there are those who care about the returned girl. These are genuinely scary stories. The book was out of print for many years, but let's hope that it remains available for a good while.

The title story Couching at the Door hit me harder than many of the works of much more famous authors of ghost and horror stories. The horror in this story is one's own horror, a creation of one's own sins, and the more one fights it, the more one tries to pawn it off on others, the more the horror grows. The other stories have different themes but I keep returning to the first one.