The Travelling Grave

There is to nearly every good writer's imagination asuperstitious edge - a sense of fear, a feeling of the essentialstrangeness of life, a glimpse of the darkened realms of themind into which reason fails to penetrate. In this finecollection of tales by the author whose best-known work isThe Go-Between, L.P. Hartley shows himself to be amongthose writers who have treated the unearthly and theuncanny with the greatest subtlety and skill.His stories, whether of human crimes or of supernaturalvisitations, shake our reliance on the explicability of aninexplicable universe and sound a note of doom, ofirretrievable disaster. With the novelist's sharp eye for detailHartley vividly portrays the exterior of social life; but healso explores the underlying world of fears and fantasieswith a power that is at once compelling and strangelydisturbing.