My reviews of THE TRAVELLING GRAVE AND OTHER STORIES: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/the-travelling-grave-and-other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/
And THE TWO VAYNES and a few other stories: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2022/08/15/the-two-vaynes-by-l-p-hartley/
Any further reviews will be in comment stream below…
THE CROSSWAYS
“Michael still carried a scar from a gash that a bear had given him; it ran all the way from his elbow to his shoulder, making a bluish groove in his skin which you could feel with your finger. When he wanted to impress on them the danger of going too far into the forest he would show them the scar. Olga used to try not to look at it but Peter said he would like to have one like it.”
Michael, stern and sometimes bad-tempered, lived with his wife Lucindra or ‘Cindra’, foreign and sometimes she uses a language her two children Peter and Olga do not understand. They live in or near a forest but he says they should not go deeper into the forest to where they could not see the light at its edge. Until a pedlar arrives when Michael is not there with shiny and sharp objects to buy and his telling of the crossways in the middle of the forest signposted to the land of heart’s desire. The outcome takes us past a bear who stands up when it sees us but believes our story and goes off, back on all fours
Our circular route home, unless our foot is injured like Cindra’s and there is nobody there to carry us? Michael’s cross ways transcended?
THE SHADOW ON THE WALL by L.P. Hartley
“It might have been someone she knew, but who can recognise a shadow?”
A decidedly strange story, so strange, it outdoes Aickman, and is far more frightening than it seems at outset, indeed genuinely frightening in spite – or because – of the intrinsic absurdisms, as we follow Mildred Fanshawe, “a bachelor woman” and interior decorator to a stay-over-night house party, a house she had done some work in for a widow called Joanna. A house like a hollow E, whatever that means! Mildred, being famous for her neuroses, she is for some reason put into a room next to a single gentleman who makes the party into an 8. Mildred thus under his protection as it were in a separate wing of the E from the other guests, a wing with two rooms each with doors to the corridor and a shared lockable partition door. There is so much here of an oblique fish-gaping nature, and the more mundane muddy boots outside in the corridor, and snake-like blood coils, and that shadow on the wall while Mildred sits in the bath, and involving reconnaissances between rooms with or without a torch, and was there one man in the bed next door, or two? — and other disarming or disconcerting strangenesses galore, and I cannot really do justice to the tantalisingly inexplicable scare-power of this story as a whole.