The Croquet Player

by H.G. Wells

Book by

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Classics, Novella, Mystery, British Literature, Fantasy

82 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's apprentice as a teenager. The headmaster of Midhurst Grammar School, where he had spent a year, arranged for him to return as an "usher," or student teacher. Wells earned a government scholarship in 1884, to study biology under Thomas Henry Huxley at the Normal School of Science. Wells earned his bachelor of science and doctor of science degrees at the University of London. After marrying his cousin, Isabel, Wells began to supplement his teaching salary with short stories and freelance articles, then books, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wells created a mild scandal when he divorced his cousin to marry one of his best students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Although his second marriage was lasting and produced two sons, Wells was an unabashed advocate of free (as opposed to "indiscriminate") love. He continued to openly have extra-marital liaisons, most famously with Margaret Sanger, and a ten-year relationship with the author Rebecca West, who had one of his two out-of-wedlock children. A one-time member of the Fabian Society, Wells sought active change. His 100 books included many novels, as well as nonfiction, such as A Modern Utopia (1905), The Outline of History (1920), A Short History of the World (1922), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). One of his booklets was Crux Ansata, An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. Although Wells toyed briefly with the idea of a "divine will" in his book, God the Invisible King (1917), it was a temporary aberration. Wells used his international fame to promote his favorite causes, including the prevention of war, and was received by government officials around the world. He is best-remembered as an early writer of science fiction and futurism.

He was also an outspoken socialist. Wells and Jules Verne are each sometimes referred to as "The Fathers of Science Fiction". D. 1946.

More: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/H._...

http://www.online-literature.com/well...

http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells

Reviews

[Paul Weiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

”I read evil things between the lines in the newspapers, and usually very faintly but sometimes quite plainly I see, behind the transparent front of things, that cave-man face …”

THE CROQUET PLAYER is definitely not the kind of story HG Wells fans would expect if they were looking for sci-fi novels that might compare to the likes of THE TIME MACHINE or THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU. It is actually a dark, deeply atmospheric ghost story written with a foreboding, “haunting” literary style that would have done credit to the likes of Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft. The evil in the story arises from a small town named Cainsmarsh in a clear reference to the first biblical murder. While it dabbles briefly in the ultra-religious Calvinistic preaching against the scientific truth of Darwin’s theories of evolution, ultimately THE CROQUET PLAYER is believed by literary scholars to be a cautionary allegorical tale warning England and the world against the dangers of Hitler and his emerging cult of Nazism. In effect, Wells compares an unnamed Hitler to an emerging universal evil in the world that is equivalent to a resurgence of antediluvian and unevolved beast man or caveman. Frankly, I think this is an insult to the behaviour and thinking of pre-Homo Sapiens species such as the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon and reflects a rather self-righteous view of the advanced moralistic state of human thinking.

I would prefer to consider a somewhat more modern interpretation (strictly my own, I might add) in which the entire story is allegorical INCLUDING the references to caveman fossils and bones. Consider the caveman fossils and bones as being Hitler and the evils of Nazism which ought to serve as its own warning to today’s and future humanity. The frightening ghostly evil emerging from the mists of the story’s locale in Cainsmarsh stands in for the global fascination with neo-Nazism and hard right-wing politics with which the world is currently flirting. Most notably, of course, the USA might do very well to consider HG Wells as having offered a prescient warning against the rising evils of Trump, MAGA Republicans, and their version of neo-Nazism. YMMV and you might consider this idea to be far wide of the mark, but it is what it is.

Definitely recommended.

Paul Weiss

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting book, and one that brings many thoughts to mind. Yes, a thoughtful book. Poorly named, by the way. The title makes it sound boring. It's not actually about The Croquet Player at all, he's just the one listening to a man's story.

Basically, this Croquet Player finds a man who tells him about Cainsmarsh, a place where people seem to get infected by fear. He himself had gotten the bug, and tells of his journy in trying to figure out what it means.

If you want to know what it means: (Gives away entire book)
In the end, it is shown that the man was in fact mad. That his mind could not deal with the revelation that no matter what hights civilization comes to, we are all at heart beasts like our ape ancestors and that there is violence and pain everywhere that can never be got rid of. Now, I'm not an evolutionist, so that part was like "yeah, whatever" But from my Christian standpoint it still touched a chord somewhere, because it reminded me that no matter what society tries to do, we can't rise above the sin nature by ourselves. Unfortunately the "by ourselves" part is the part not in the book. Anyway, enough rambling, you can read the book and make your own deductions from there.

In the end I found it a short (just under 100 pages) easy read that many might find interesting. Not at all what you expect from Wells, so don't come to it expecting time machines and aliens, because you won't find them. It has a bit of a chill to it, but I wouldn't call it scary (Maybe because I'm a Christian and have the "by ourselves" part added, but I don't think it would really be so anyways {If that didn't make sense you didn't read the spoiler. Just ignore it})

I am quite happy with it. For being a short little book, it's quite deep. I see myself pondering it for a bit.

[Lucas Mattila · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy 4.5/5.

The Croquet Player isn't a particularly well known novel by H.G. Wells, but it's a damn good one. Originally published in 1936, it expresses a lot of apocalyptic anxiety that still permeates into our culture(s) today:

"We have been multiplying memories, histories, traditions, we have filled ourselves with forebodings and plannings and apprehensions. And so our worlds have become overwhelmingly vast for us, terrific, appalling. Things that have seemed forgotten for ever have suddenly come back into the very present of our consciousness" (72).

[Bev · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a sort of ghost story they unfolded. But it is not an ordinary ghost story. It is much more realistic and haunting and disturbing than any ordinary ghost story. (pp. 1-2)

After all-- It is in just such a flat, still atmosphere perhaps--translucent, gentle coloured, that things lying below the surface, things altogether hidden in more eventful and colourful surroundings, creep on our perceptions....(p. 19)

The Croquet Player is, as the quote above states, no ordinary ghost story. There are no horrible specters haunting our main characters, no otherworldly demons or goblins or any other tangible things which go bump in the night. The atmosphere in this Wells novel relies entirely on the infectious nature of fear. The croquet player, our narrator, is staying at Les Noupets (evidently a health-spa area with springs for a "water cure) and encounters a doctor who is in the area for a rest. The doctor perceives our man to be a "reasonably balanced" and fairly unworried individual and begins to tell him of the source of his own distress--the countryside of Cairnmarsh. He relates how he was slowly driven mad by the haunted nature of Cairnmarsh--how all of the inhabitants are fearful and seem almost possessed. He tells of a vicar driven to beat his wife and of the brutal treatment of a dog...and how the atmosphere of the place finally drove him to seek the help of a nerve specialist.

The haunting is very ambiguous some of the locals fear that it is the spirit of Cain--the father of all murderers--that is haunting them and causing them to behave so irrationally towards each other. To mistrust and even hate one another. Others think that the ancient emotions and primitive drives of the Neanderthals (such as belonged to the bodies recently dug up in the marsh) are infecting those who live in the area. But the fear and irrational behavior is spreading beyond the marshlands....

The most compelling part of the "ghost story" is when the doctor is telling his tale. Even though we know that there is no real ghost, we are sure that doctor really believes that something tangible is responsible for his fear and the irrational behavior of the inhabitants of Cairnmarsh. Wells's story really serves as an allegory for the fear and tensions that were building just before World War II. Just as Cain was driven to kill his brother Abel; just as primitive man had to fight tooth and nail to survive--man's more primitive nature would be coming out in the conflict to come. Mankind is--in a way--haunted by a nature that seems to compel us to conflict with one another.


As both a ghost story and an allegory, The Croquet Player rates a solid three stars.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wells' dark fantasy The Croquet Player is a shockingly meditative piece about the horrors facing not only the pre-WWll world of Wells' 1936, but also what we are to make of madness yet to come. What starts out as a somewhat genteel tale quickly spins into a disturbing examination of one person's struggle between what is real and what is insanity. The all consuming contagion here discussed is quite prophetic for our current times. Wells' story creeps along in an unsettling way, working its way into the shadowy, anxious places of the psyche. An excellent timeless work.

[Sasha]

goddamn indolent croquet players

[Pete F · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to be a great fan of Wells and avidly read all the books by him that I could get hold of. Nowadays I am not so keen on his books, although I do read them now and again. This one, The Croquet Player, is a novella, I would describe it partly as philosophical fiction and partly psychological horror. Very little actually happens in this story which is basically a discussion between a man who likes a quiet life with his aunt playing croquet, and two medical men, a doctor and a psychiatrist. Finchatton, the doctor, for some reason seeks out the croquet player, George Frobisher, to use as a sounding board for his belief that there is something evil about a place called Cainsmarsh. The fear he feels might be described today as existential fear, an atavistic fear, a gnawing dread eating away at the mind. It was written at the time of the Spanish Civil War and the looming threat of a war with Nazi Germany which obviously influenced the fear that Wells writes about, a welling up of savagery from an earlier stage of man, where civilisation is but a thin veneer. As with The Time Machine, published over 35 years before this story appeared, the story is influenced by the theory of evolution but seen very much in a pessimistic light (from savages, through civilisation, back to savages).

That existential fear has not gone away and is still very much with us today. It may take different forms, but it is still there. The Croquet Player is an apocalyptic story but the apocalypse is in the mind, but worrying for all that, with its biblical references and images of Cain, the first murderer in the Bible and symbolic of early man. I first read this book many, many years ago and remember being fascinated by it, but couldn't remember why. Coming back to it, it didn't have the same appeal as the first time round.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

(1936) This is a really layered horror novella from the 70-year-old Wells. At first it seems like he’s taking refuge from the chaos leading up to WWII to pen an homage to the cosmic horror of his younger days—part Machen, part Blackwood. Perhaps Poe, too. The croquet player says he likes Poe.

Even for Wells, ever political, the rumblings of world events at that time may have been too great and ominous. One can only imagine what horrors his already sensitive powers of divination were picking up. Hence, then, this late retreat to the comforts of genre fiction.

“I was keener on politics than most medical students. And I got very keen on social justice and the prevention of war. Very keen on the war question.”

And yet real life finds a way. The main character of this work (not the amusingly frivolous croquet player of the frame story) is a London physician named Finchatton, who similarly tries to flee the anxieties of the world and moves his practice to a marshy part of England called Cainsmarsh. No more newspapers for him. “I wouldn’t read a book later than Dickens,” he says. All this, only to find that no flight from fear is possible.

Cainsmarsh, we’re told, is not the sort of colorful town for a ghost story. But there’s something about its very dullness, the watery translucence of the place, that makes it vulnerable to other dimensions and allows ghosts to “creep on our perceptions.” Dread oppresses our doctor. Nightmares torture him. His patients, too, look uneasy. It is as if the land itself were haunted. The doctor confides in the vicar, and then a curate. They also feel it. The vicar had gone into a rant:

“And then he began to talk less sanely. The evil was in the soil, he declared, UNDERGROUND… There was something mighty and dreadful, buried in Cainsmarsh. Something colossally evil. Broken up. Scattered all over the Marsh… They kept on stirring it up, he said, they would not let it rest. Whom did he mean by THEY? That was difficult. There had been road- making, there have been drainage works and now 'those archæologists'! And that was not all. There had been a ploughing of old pastures during the war. Opening old sores… ‘Graves—graves everywhere!' And some of the ancient people, he said, were 'petrified.' You found stones of the strangest shapes. Abominable shapes. 'They keep on bringing things up,' he said. 'Things that had better be let alone. Ought to be let alone. Making doubts and puzzles —destroying faith.' At a jump he was denouncing Darwinism and evolution. It was remarkable how life-long controversies had interwoven with his Cainsmarsh distresses!”

It is not so much a jump as the doctor thinks. Digging is a metaphor for digging into the past. It’s a bit confusing, but it seems that in Wells’ thesis it was Man’s quest for knowledge—from which we get those roads and drains and archeologists—that brought this haunting, that disturbed our animal-like ignorance and caused our current malaise. “…we men, we have been probing and piercing into the past and future. We have been multiplying memories, histories, traditions, we have filled ourselves with forebodings and plannings and apprehensions. And so our worlds have become overwhelmingly vast for us, terrific, appalling.”

In other words, it’s just like reading the papers.

The reference to Darwin is key. Stories like this, and like one by EF Benson I recently read called The Horror-Horn, are important because they document perhaps the last fleeting moments when society was still wounded by Darwinism. It’s hard to relate to now because we don’t remember how comforting it must have felt believing in a literal reading of Genesis. We’ve forgotten the disillusionment. (The disillusionment and the terror, as we will see).

The doctor seeks out one of these neighboring archeologists and finds, displayed in a glass case, a Paleolithic skull dug up from Cainsmarsh. This human skull, with its grin and gaping eye sockets, becomes the story’s central image and quickly dominates the doctor’s nightmares.

“‘In the foreground I saw his innumerable descendants… [He means the prehistoric man’s.] Presently these swarms began to fall into lines and columns, were clad in uniforms, formed up and began marching and trotting towards the black shadows under those worn and rust-stained teeth. From which darkness there presently oozed something—something winding and trickling, and something that manifestly tasted very agreeably to him. Blood.’ And then Finchatton said a queer thing. ‘Little children killed by air- raids in the street.’”

Again, the outburst is not so queer. You can see in this passage the allegory that Wells is painting. That skull is what links the evil shadows of the distant past and the shadowy intimations of evil in the near future. Our primitive ancestor is made into a kind of atavistic god of war.

What does it say of us, Wells asks, that we are descended unchanged from cavemen? (In fact, at one point we are characterized as no more than trained cavemen). Well, it says that barbarity is indeed again on the horizon. (The reasoning is a bit circular, in that our enlightenment is what dispelled the fictions of religion and reunited us with our violent, bestial past. I confess I’m still working all this out as I write).

As in The Shining, or The Turn of the Screw before it, this is a haunting that drives its inhabitants mad and to evil deeds. The town has a history of murders. It’s when the doctor finds a dog beaten to a literal pulp, and an elderly patient of his attacks a wife who may or may not be poisoning him, that he finally decides to flee, to a sunny village on the Normandy coast—where he meets the croquet player.

The croquet player is a foil, sitting out there on the hotel terrace in the sun, nibbling a brioche and consuming a “harmless” vermouth and seltzer. He is a man who loafs through life, playing bridge or tennis with his aunt, and croquet, of course, and he doesn’t read the papers, which he finds “pompous or wilfully disagreeable. But I do The Times Cross-Word Puzzle…” (However, there are dark hints that even this comical figure cannot escape what’s coming, when, towards the end of the story, he finds world events intruding on his pleasant life, and his plans are disrupted by a strike and a fight at the depot involving communists).

He listens with rapt attention and sympathy to the doctor’s story. Next day he encounters there not the doctor but the doctor’s psychiatrist. Wells uses this imposing figure to psychoanalyze the doctor and, through him, himself, finally laying his cards on the table and telling you what he’s been doing with this novella.

The whole story has been a fiction.

“He's told you,” says the psychiatrist, “practically everything—but as though he showed it through bottle glass that distorted it all. And the reason why he has made it all up into that story… is because the realities that are overwhelming him are so monstrous and frightful that he has to transform them into this fairy tale about old skulls and silences in butterfly land, in the hope of getting them down to the dimensions of an hallucination and so presently expelling them from his thoughts."

People like the doctor “refuse to face a world so grim and great as this world really is. They take refuge in stories of hauntings…”

Very much like Wells had set off to do with this story.

A new plague is coming, continues the psychiatrist. A plague “of the soul. A distress of the mind that has long lurked in odd corners of the mind, an endemic disorder, rising suddenly and spreading into a world epidemic. The story our friend put away into a sort of fairyland fenland is really the story of thousands of people today—and it will be the story of hundreds of thousands tomorrow.”

“Madness, sir… is poor Nature's answer to overwhelming fact. It is flight. And today all over the world, INTELLECTUAL MEN ARE GOING MAD!”

But what, the croquet player asks, can we do?

“Face the facts, sir! Go through with it. Survive if you can and perish if you can't. Do as I have done and shape your mind to a new scale.”

This courage is typical of Wells. It is, in fact, what he urged 10 years later when the bomb was dropped and the Atomic Age began.

But the croquet player would rather not. In fact he would rather die. And he instinctively mistrusts zealots like the psychiatrist:

“He made me think of Peter the Hermit raging through the quiet cities of eleventh-century Christendom and starting all that trouble about the Crusades. He made me think of Savonarola and John Knox and all the disturbing people who have rushed shouting across history—leaving it very much as they found it, telling people to give up their lives, go to their tents, O Israel, take up arms, storm the Tuileries, smash the Winter Palace, and a score of such outrageous things. At little old Les Noupets, mind you.”

A ghost story of ideas. Very relevant. The one twist Wells perhaps didn’t predict was how the madness of reading the news can lead to hysteria that itself creates the news.

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty powerful stuff--though inchoate; almost got the feeling it was too short or too long--but looking at it I don't really see how he could've done it differently. More or less a "Twilight"-type mood piece; especially with WWII upcoming. Liked the following snippets: "High and noble convictions, no doubt, as they professed them. But what they really wanted to do was to fight. They wanted to be at each other's throats." And: "He was striding up and down now like a Hebrew prophet. It may look all right as a part of history, this sort of rhetoric, this epoch-making and all that, but in real life it is hoarse and outrageous." Kind of surprisingly irrational to come from the pen of H G--I suppose he wanted the croquet player to come off as something of a buffoon, but I don't read it that way. At any rate, it does manage to go a lot farther toward making its point than the angst and alienation boys usually get. A pretty deep effect.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd little book, deceptively simple but with a deep and thought provoking theme that is astonishingly timely for the trump years. It's about a spreading fear and darkness that infects a whole region and causes people to become panicked and eventually cruel and violent. A novella that you can read in an afternoon but that you'll think about for quite some time to come. If you're the depressive type, you might not want to read it!

[Patti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this allegory of tension that was building in Europe in the mid 30's. My husband, who is a history buff, was excited when I wanted to talk about what England's foreign relations police was in 1936.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given this book as a bit of a lark gift but it turned out to be quite interesting. I appreciated Wells' concept of "breaking the frame of the present" and how it can be troubling to become aware of mankind's place in time.

[marmarci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro corto (o relato largo) que gira en torno al miedo. Con la fluida prosa de Wells, capaz de meterte en la historia en un par de párrafos, seguiremos a un caballero que ha tenido la suerte de tener una vida fácil y boyante, sin altibajos. Nuestro protagonista se encontrará en el lugar más tranquilo y seguro (una estación de reposo) con dos personas que le abrirán las puertas al miedo a través de una historia que es más de lo que parece.

Es una historia aparentemente sencilla pero con un subtexto muy interesante. Como siempre, Wells no defrauda.

[Viacheslav · Rating 4 out of 5]

There must be a considerable number of infected individuals in the world. I am. Dr Finchatton's mental state is exactly what any conscious honest human being should feel like when got to know what evils people are capable of. On the other hand, there are lots of cured people, insensitive to the incessant flow of sickening atrocities that human history is. And this is a book about one of them. One of the best croquet players alive, as he puts it himself. He's a bit womanish, a lot of people like him, and, what's more, he likes himself. So, what's Geogrie going to do about all of it?

[Noah Soudrette · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very curious little novella by H.G. Wells. On the surface, very much like a Poe story, this is a stimulating weird tale about a village, or possibly a single man, overcome by an irrational fear and hatred. Under the surface, we get an equally ambiguous commentary on man's spiraling descent into violence and madness, or the panic over such a fallacy. Very odd, but quite enjoyable.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling and very unique little story. Primordial and almost Jungian at its core, it seeps into you from the inside out. Fascinating also as a voice from its era and as a societal critique, and a very entertaining narrator voice from the first line.

[Frank R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beginning as a simple ghost story, this narrative turns into an anthropological nightmare with a prophetic tone for the future of mankind's psychological condition.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t really understand this story. It was quite interesting and easy to read but ultimately I’m not sure what happened or why.

[Paul Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2

[Clint Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not totally sure how I'm gonna work my way through "The Mysteries of Paris," but I finished book one and figured why not slip something quick in so I don't get worn out?

I chose this for not true reason other than it seemed quick and easy. I found it for something like a dollar at a going out of business sale at a used bookstore Jackie and I went to. And ever since I first started reading Wells in.....middle school maybe(?).....I've always had a good spot in my brain for him.

They're fun, they're interesting, they're just good stories. This one is extremely short. It was in a stand alone volume, but you can read the whole thing in an hour. It's that good blend of an engaging, quick story that still has the classic, sci-fi "things to ponder" aspect. I would probably think about things a lot more if they were all presented to me by H.G. Wells.

Can't really say much without giving anything away, but if you have an hour laying around, this is certainly worth a quick perusal. It's obviously not one of the more well-known ones, but like all the Wells I've read so far, it was well worth the time. Always fun.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The great author, H.G. Wells, shares a peculiar story in this novella. The story is allegorical, whereby a croquet player, Georgie Frobisher, narrates his interactions with two unusual men while sipping vermouth on the veranda of a club at Les Noupets (the UK).
The narrator introduces himself and then proceeds to tell the tale of the two men, one a medical doctor, Dr. Finchatton, the other a psychiatrist, Dr Norbet.
Under the guise of some ghostly supernatural entity creeping up on all the residents of Cainsmarsh, a nearby locality, the terror of the two men unfolds.
Much of the horror described is still happening today--people killing each other, abuse towards others and animals, the cries for apocalyptic destruction, fanatical voices urging unrest--so the story is still relevant some 85 years after it was written. It is a bit sad--we humans have not evolved beyond the ways of our ancestors--murder, torture, rape, tyranny, and tribalism.
I'd say the allegory could have been illustrated better.

Additional note from this reader: Until humans realize and embrace the fact that we are but one species among many on this planet, our only home for now, then we will find no peace.

[Stephen Corbett · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of many forgotten Wells little gems.
This is one of Wells later books, a novella from 1936.
An u usual title that may put people off giving it a go,but,for such a short book,it really packs a punch,and is quite relevant today .
You can read this in one of two ways. As a straight forward supernatural type tale or you could pick up on the hidden meaning of mankinds future. I found a similar motif in his early classic The Island of Dr.Moreau, ie Beast into Man,Man into beast .
In The Croquet Player it goes further back to our Neanderthal ancestors and how society can revert back to brutality and the basic survival instinct.
Have we learned from our past history? Can we as a modern Society improve our lot as a species,or will the beast within always resurface and murder,war,and self importance win the day,will society eventually fall under it's own will.

A one sitting read,well worth taking your time over to get the hidden meaning between the lines.
As is usual with Wells ,his grasp of the marshes and unsettling environment shines through.

[Andy Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short read and a slightly odd one. Nice frame - carefree young, not very macho man travels Europe with his aunt enjoying light sporting activities (he's a particular whizz at croquet). In Normandy he slips away for an aperitif and meets a doctor, there with his psychiatrist for a rest cure. He starts to tell his story - is it a ghost story? It stops somewhat short but it is about strange feelings experienced by the population of an isolated community in the fens. A second conversation with the psychiatrist then reveals the psychiatric insight - there is an epidemic of doubt about the nature of civilisation- a community madness that may take us back into our true caveman nature unless we can get through it. The croquet player seems pretty immune. He just wants to carry on with his simple pleasures. A clue to rationale for this odd philosophical turn in the narrative is the date of publication. It is 1936 and Europe is questioning the nature of civilisation and flirting with fascism.

[Eric Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

The horror in this story lies in the reality of it. The horror in this isn’t a monster of ghost like you may be led to believe in the beginning. The anxiety and paranoia of humanity surrounding the sliding back into its animalistic impulses of greed and cruelty.

Over the course of the book many of the characters realize the nature of an ‘evil’ that exists everywhere only to find out that it is truly everywhere.

The protagonist and title character serves as a perfect ground for the reader to not only observe the story as it is told to them but also to be slowly infected and awakened to the true darkness that exists in all of us.

This book was published in 1936 and it blows my mind how a book over 100 years old could be even more relevant to the current state of things than when it was published.

Put simply this is a novella encapsulating the terror of humanities own evil and how we haven’t changed much since caveman times.

[A.R. Yngve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late in his career, the enormously successful science fiction writer H.G.Wells returned to the theme of Evolution in this novella. His earlier novel THE TIME MACHINE dealt with the future evolution of humanity into Eloi and Morlocks. (If you haven't read this classic, go to Librivox.org and listen to the audiobook version).

THE CROQUET PLAYER deals with humanity's evolutionary progress today.

Through the clever use of several "unreliable narrators," Wells seems to argue: Perhaps fascism is a hysterical reaction against the scientific insight that we are still, genetically speaking, prehistoric cavemen. Or perhaps all our progress since the Stone Age has been one giant delusion, and the cavemen are coming back...

Whatever you'll read into this haunting, odd little book, it is highly relevant to our time - when caveman politicians stalk the globe.

[Snood · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I reached the last third of this novella, a horrible realization dawned upon me,

“This is a literature class book, isn’t it...?”

Allow me to explain, some books can be picked up and enjoyed by pretty much anyone at any time. Then there are books that desperately need an instructor talking to you twice weekly about how this book is actually a masterpiece due to its clever satire on the political climate of its time, how powerfully the book understands the human psyche, and how the storytelling only becomes richer the more you ponder on it with your classmates.

Without all that, The Croquet Player is a disappointingly dull hundred pages that I can’t recommend to any casual readers. I’m sure there’s genius in there somewhere (it is H. G. Wells, after all), but the deeper meaning is buried under too many layers of Neanderthal skull philosophizing.

[Ellis Wasend · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this one was lack lustre at first but by halfway through the last chapter I think I got what he was saying and the message of the book. I find myself thinking that. H G Wells is so far ahead of his time in terms of understanding big concepts that I associate with modernity, but part of the joy in reading his works is getting to question what’s actually part of modernity and what’s inherent to humanity itself? So many times I found myself wondering how he understood social contagion of issues and anxieties, it felt like too new of a phenomenon but maybe it’s not. Maybe he’s writing about the times he lived in and it seems so accurate to today that I recognize it is modern and pertaining yo me? Either way, the way this book ends pulls it all together in a cool way. The cover of the book was also beautiful

[Cale · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that is very much of its time, which is mid-1930's England. There's an afterword that does a thorough job of explaining the story in the context of its time and Wells' intent with the story. Which to be perfectly honest, doesn't come through in the story itself. It's a three-part novella; part 1 introduces the narrator, a Bertram Wooster type, part 2 tells the secondhand tale of a disturbing rural district, and part 3 calls into question that tale.
Wells does capture some sense of the disquiet of a world that is leaning toward World War 2, (and it has its echoes today), but there really isn't much of a story here. I'd never heard of this Wells book before, and now I know why.

[Kalvin Madsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novella was really fun, and incredibly interesting. I read a couple reviews here just to see what people though, because I couldn’t find anything I didn’t like about the story. I agree the name is not great, but looking past that I think this is a scary, and intriguing story.

I like the idea of a guy being haunted by ancestors, and being bothered by the fact that people used to roam around without civilization. I like how I can’t really trust any of the characters, even the therapist Norbert. The anti-civilization themes are applied really nice in this book, in a way that didn’t feel political.

I tried to find video reviews and stuff about this book but couldn’t really find any, so I made an account on this apps. Will be giving this book to a friend soon to see what they think

[Kubuś · Rating 3 out of 5]

3, so far the worst Wells' book I've read, but still not a bad book!

Przeczytałem polską wersję bez ISBNu wydawnictwa Cyklady z białą okładką. Fabuła przywodziła mi na myśl fantastyczne fabuły Poego lub niehorrorowego Lovecrafta. Wielkie zło czyhające w niewielkim mieście i przez lata pożerające i powodujące panikę mieszkańców, wzocnione odkryciem wiekowych szczątek hominida? Świetny set-up, szkoda, że nie jest nieco dłuższy i bardziej budzący grozę. Rozwiazanie fabuły bardzo zagadkowe, jak sam jej początek, podobało mi się, że wszystko było historią w historii natomiast przeszkadzało mi łamanie tekstu, w wielu momentach miałem problem z odszyfrowaniem, kto mówi i czy ktoś mu odpowiada, czy kontynuuje monolog. Po przeczytaniu tej książki interesuje mnie, czy wszyscy gracze krokieta są tacy twardo stąpający po ziemii i niewzruszeni w obliczu Apokalipsy... krokieta, którego do czasu tej lektury nie odróżniałem od krykieta.