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Post by andydecker on Apr 19, 2020 20:19:49 GMT
I have to confess that I never even knew he existed before reading this. ...
Please read the short-story "The Travelling Grave", and come back and give us your impression report.  Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose?
The rest was at first amusing in a kind of Bertie Wooster way, but he lost me when they were playing hide and seek. Huh? I read the next one in this collection Feet Foremost and couldn't muster much interest after a few pages.
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Post by Knygathin on Apr 20, 2020 13:42:53 GMT
Please read the short-story "The Travelling Grave", and come back and give us your impression report.  Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose?
The rest was at first amusing in a kind of Bertie Wooster way, but he lost me when they were playing hide and seek. Huh? I read the next one in this collection Feet Foremost and couldn't muster much interest after a few pages.
Sorry, it was not my intention to waste your time.  Funny how differently people take to reading the same story. "The Travelling Grave" is one of my own very favorite discoveries over the last 20 years. It is a surrealistic dreamlike hallucination. I take it, the device is a bizarre supernatural murdering tool, that also hides the victims under the parquet floor (although it flunks at the end). My favorite scene is when it crawls like a crab, moving around in unpredictable direction. That gives me shivers. And the final scene of course. It takes the grand prize.
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Post by humgoo on Apr 20, 2020 16:43:01 GMT
Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose? And you can imagine how baffled the readers of a certain book called The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories were, which begins with this particular story (after a most pretentiousliterary introduction).
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Post by helrunar on Apr 20, 2020 17:05:33 GMT
It's fascinating to me how much difference there can be in how various people respond, or fail to respond, to a story. (I haven't read the story by LP Hartley under discussion.)
When I was reading a couple of the Lady Asquith Ghost Book volumes a few months ago, I was really struck by a couple of instances where other Vault residents raved about a particular tale--I'd read it, and fail to find much at all to pique my interest. There were other tales that seemed to have attracted very little notice at all, but they really rang my chimes, often because of specifics of character and atmosphere which tend to be what I look for at this point in my life, in a yarn.
I do think it's a good thing that human taste is so variable. And it's why, if I had more of an ideological bent, I'd be flatly opposed to all these never ending bloody 10, 20, 50, 100 "greatest ever" blah-blah blather lists. I do see that they provide harmless entertainment for those who compile the lists, and the numerous people who take pleasure in disagreeing or fiddling with the order or specificity of entries. To each their own.
cheers, Hel
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Post by andydecker on Apr 21, 2020 7:30:31 GMT
Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose? And you can imagine how baffled the readers of a certain book called The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories were, which begins with this particular story (after a most pretentiousliterary introduction). Indeed. I looked the content up, and maybe the Blackwood would have been a bit easier to digest. Thanks for the comments. After reading this I guess from now on I will see those tales of weekends-in-the-country-with-the-idle-rich with other eyes
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