Out of the Deep

the long version

Walter de la Mare wrote some of the finest supernatural stories in the English language. This new collection reveals him as an enigmatic writer of macabre and troubling tales that take unexpected turns into the supernatural. A visitor from an alternate world is glimpsed in a snowy churchyard; a box contains a creature that resembles (but not quite closely enough) a human being; two schoolboys spend a holiday with a sinister aunt. In many of these stories, ordinary settings in the English countryside possess a hallucinatory quality - a sense of meaning beyond our grasp, and events running out of kilter with reality. Like all the best ghost stories, these haunting tales offer an enduring sense of mystery with an explanation that remains tantalisingly out of reach. They grow richer with each reading - lingering in the mind and becoming ever more sinister, and more profound.