Out of the Deep by Walter De La Mare: book review

Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales (original stories from 1895-1932, this edition 2017) is a collection of 13 supernatural short stories.

British author Walter De La Mare (1973-1956) was a prolific writer of poetry, and ghoulish tales, as well as disturbing supernatural stories that could scare an imaginative child witless for years. These stories have been selected as an example of his best supernatural yarns, with twists and unexpected turns.

Expect to find stories with an undercurrent of melancholy about the path not travelled, ghouish graveyards, inhuman creatures, surreal happenings, and an abundance of subtle sinister endings. Some tales are brief with abrupt endings, while others draw out the suspense – and fear. But all are, on the surface, everyday events in everyday locations.

Settings include a bookstore, a railway station, an aunt’s home, a lecture room, a garden, a window, and in plenty of old houses – but there is always something creepy about them: ‘It is difficult to suggest; but it was as if a certain aspect – the character of the room, its walls, angles, patterns, furniture, had been peculiarly intensified. Whatever was naturally grotesque in it was now more grotesque – and less real … And then I heard the sound of voices: the faint, hollow, incoherent sound that voices make at a distance in a large house. At that, I confess, a deadly chill came over me.’ Not only are there strange sounds, but there, in the short stories, are the sounds of footsteps …

Yes, everything seems relatively normal – creepy but normal – until something ‘troubling’ occurs.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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