The Bell in the Fog & Other Stories

These are fine, well-constructed stories. And uniformly grim. Not grim in a gruesome sense (in "The Striding Place", Atherton does indulge in the lurid, but it's tame by today's standards), since most of these are neither supernatural or mystery stories but psychological studies that explore, with a heavy dose of irony, life as tragedy. Well worth reading, just not straight through.

I wouldn't have bothered to review this particular book of ghost stories, but I thought that the previous review-more the star rating than the review itself- left a unfair impression. It's true that Atherton was no M.R James or J.S Le Fanu, but how many are? I think this collection is a perfectly fine example of the second tier of late Victorian ghost story collections. After you've read the masters of the genre, if you, like me, love these old stories, you'll want to take a look at some of the works of the lesser lights of the period, which thankfully have suddenly been reprinted en mass by Wordsworth Books in the U.K. It's been a long time since a publisher has bothered to take a bunch of these wonderful old collections and even a few novels (like Le Fanu's "House By the Churchyard") and reprinted them in very inexpensive editions. Up until now, many of these were only available (IF available at all) in very expensive sets by small press publishers, or in the original collections which fetch high prices on the auction and second hand book sites.