When I read these stories by thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My previous reviews of older or classic fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
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WITH AND WITHOUT BUTTONS
“He hesitated. There was something very direct and somehow comforting in the way he was taking it, piece by piece as it happened, not as what he would think it ought to mean.”
This is quite a find for me! Prose-textured and haunted with more than a hint of Aickman’s disarming strangeness and of Elizabeth Bowen’s psychological garments in earlier 20th century English abodes and, dare I say, of the ‘Only Connect’ ethos in my collaborative story collection with my father Gordon Lewis that was published last century — and this first Butts story to be read in relatively random order by me tells of two sisters living in one of the two houses butting on to each other that were once a single house, with almost a shared loft/attic give or take a door in the wall now built up there between. And the sisters try to tease or hoax the man next door called Trenchard to ridicule more than just his superstition, by randomly planting kid gloves with and without buttons, and by concocting seemingly random on the hoof fibs, but somehow with a preternatural truth (as does gestalt real-time reviewing itself) of a haunted woman from the past, a tease that gets out of hand when kid gloves start planting themselves etc, complete with pungent smells! This story is so much better than I have just tried, over-personally, to do justice to in this short review. No ifs or buttons, it has excited me to read more Butts in the future.
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