Those tales that do have ghosts - and the supernatural impinges on the majority of these tales - don’t look too deeply into the nature of the supernatural. Hartley’s first book, the collection Night Fears, which contains some of the tales later collected in The Travelling Grave But, of course, things don’t quite work out the way Munt - or the reader - expects. When Munt realises Curtis hasn’t told anyone else he’s come, and is unlikely to be missed for some time if he disappears, it of course sets this collector thinking about fully testing this latest addition to his collection. The tale begins by introducing us to Hugh Curtis - “a vague man with an unretentive mind”, making him sound like perfect victim material - who’s persuaded by an acquaintance to spend the weekend at Munt’s house. I didn’t show you here, because I value my floors, but it can bury itself in wood in three minutes and in newly turned earth, say a flower-bed, in one.” If it got a fellow up against a wall, I don’t think he’d stand much chance. “But it’s very quick, and it has that funny gift of anticipation. As its owner Munt, a collector of unusual coffins, says: The perfect example is the lead tale, “The Travelling Grave”, which introduces what I like to think of as a literal plot device, in the shape of a mobile, mechanical coffin that is not only self-burying, but will also gather up and kill - snatch and despatch - its occupant. Hartley plays an artful game of laying out everything a reader needs to anticipate what’s coming - all, that is, but the final detail, the who-it-happens-to, or how-it-happens. I came to The Travelling Grave thinking of it as a collection of ghost stories, but they’re not ghost stories - even those with ghosts in them (or, really, walking corpses) - so much as contes cruels, whose focus is on the method of delivering each tale’s particular moment of comeuppance or revelation. Mr Hartley succeeds in doing this time after time, and doing it so well that I cannot offhand think of any other contemporary writer who managed this effect quite so memorably.” Hartley’s book can be recommended especially to those readers who like to be led casually into a setting and story and brought up short, face to face with terror and horror. It was reviewed (if that’s the right word for a piece in the publisher’s own magazine) in the Arkham Sampler for Spring 1924: Although The Travelling Grave was first published by Arkham House in 1948, most of the stories it collects had already appeared in LP Hartley’s British collections Night Fears (1924) and The Killing Bottle and Other Stories (1932).
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