Ghost Stories

by Walter de la Mare, Richard E. Grant (Narrator), Toby Jones (Narrator)

All Hallows
A weary traveller is oppressed by the atmosphere inside a cathedral by the sea.

Seaton's Aunt
Two boys spend a holiday with a sinister aunt, an experience that will mark them forever.

Crewe
In a railway station waiting room, an old man shares the haunting tale of a past job.

A Recluse
One hot night, a traveller must stay at a sinister gentleman's remote house.

The Almond Tree
A man recalls the love affair he witnessed, and that will influence the rest of his life.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Ghost Stories, Classics, Ghosts

3 pages, Audiobook

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Walter John de la Mare was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem "The Listeners", and for his psychological horror short fiction, including "Seaton's Aunt" and "All Hallows". In 1921, his novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and his post-war Collected Stories for Children won the 1947 Carnegie Medal for British children's books.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ghost stories of the poet Walter De La Mare were written in the late 1920s and impressed HP Lovecraft. They are tales of unease rather than horror. There is always a doubt as to the veracity of the narrators or rather their own ability to assess what they are seeing or being told.

In fact, the general pattern is of two narrators - the apparently ordinary visitant to the scene and the person who most directly experiences an alleged phenomenon and who then conveys their experience. Or is it their neuroses which the primary narrator then experiences in turn?

In 'All Hallows', a tourist may or may not experience the opening of the demonic gates of hell in a deserted cathedral at night under the guidance of an old priest who fears for the future of the world.

In 'Seaton's Aunt', a very ordinary and unexcitable young man may or may not believe that Seatons' aunt is in league with dark and occult forces in hatred of the boy. The evidence could be interpreted as proof of such a claim or merely suggestibility in the wake of such a claim.

In 'Crewe', a railway traveller is stuck in a waiting room with a garrulous old working man who tells a tale with evident sincerity of dark doings on a gentleman's estate that might be evidence of vengeance from beyond the grave or his own uneducated superstition.

In 'A Recluse', the most psychologically sensitive story, a lonely and remarkably boring man apparently manipulates the narrator into staying the night and the question becomes whether he is doing so for dark purposes or the narrator is suffering from a bout of nervous paranoia.

In this last story (we have not reviewed 'The Almond Tree' so it may be different again), the narrator is narrating his conversation with 'The Recluse' rather than the recluse's own tale. Yet we still have the words of a third party to interpret and only as the narrator recalls them.

These four stories might suggest a 'sameness' but there is nothing of the kind here. Each of them, although a variant of the same basic structure, is unique and superbly written. The similarity is that we are being forced into making our own judgements about the reliability of both the narrators.

Author, us, narrators telling the tale and narrating the narration (or conversation) of the person who gives them the data on which they are to make judgements - all create a general sense of unreliability that creates unease in us if only because our primary narrators are uneasy.

Is the author manipulating us and there are no ghosts and demons? Are the characters he creates for our primary narrators manipulating the primary narrators and so us? Certainly the author is manipulating everything and we have no proof of ghosts or demons.

But we are left feeling very uneasy just the same ...

[Jim Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: this is a review of the BBC series of astutely expurgated for runtime audio readings of the de la Mare ghost/horror stories All Hallows, Seaton's Aunt, A Recluse and Crewe. Each of them is a masterpiece of de la Mare's and well-narrated by their respective narrator. Not to be confused with the book of the same name, which is a strong selection of de la Mare's more dramatic, though no less eerie, ghost stories (Out of the Deep and The Green Room being particularly excellent), but lacks the four horror stories I'm rating here.

For reasons beyond my comprehension this BBC series concludes with a reading of The Almond Tree, which is a superlative story of a young boy's perception of his father's infidelity, but the story wouldn't even fit my broad definition of a ghost story. Why not instead have included an acknowledged classic horror story, such as Out of the Deep, A:B:O, Mr. Kempe or The Tree? The world may never know – still, this series featured four of de la Mare's finest ghost stories, which match the quality of Robert Aickman's, and the remaining tale is up there with Missing as one of his finest strange story efforts outside genre. It is to be hoped we get another run adapting more of his tales.

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even as I categorized these stories as horror,they are more on the side of gothic ones. Disquieting and slow-paced, they manage to leave you with a slight unnerving senset.

The writing is delightful and I really enjoyed it.

[Elizabeth Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

These recordings have become familiar friends after numerous re-runs on Radio 4 Extra, and each time I revisit them I find some exquisite haunting detail that I missed the first time, particularly in the case of Seaton's Aunt which remains one of the most disturbing pieces I've come across in the genre. One of the things I like about de la Mare is his tendency respect the reader (or listener) by leaving space for them to fill in the details themselves, particularly in this selection. I agree re. the Almond Tree, it seems out of place among the others in tone, but it is still rather unsettling in tone, perhaps because it raises more questions than it answers. I should add that every reading is a remarkable interpretation of the work, I find it impossible to decide which is my favourite of the set - All Hallows is read by Richard E Grant, Seaton's Aunt by Toby Jones, Crewe by Kenneth Cranham, A Recluse by Anthony Head and The Almond Tree by Julian Wadham. I too hope that the series is added to in the future, though I fear the funding crisis at the BBC brought about by short-sighted cutback seems to have put pay to many good things that were in the Radio 4 extra pipeline some years back

[Mike Wenzel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's ok. I liked the story of Seaton's Aunt and The Almond Tree was pretty good. But it is kind of old without much of the spookiness that makes a more modern ghost story.