Not sure what to say about this one. It's unclear whether de la Mare is intentionally being funny, or is deadly serious about absurd things.

A good example is the tale about the lecturer, who gives a fifteen minute (and possibly twice as many pages) talk on Edgar Allen Poe, followed by an afterword from the guy who invited him to lecture. After the talk breaks up, the ghost of Poe shows up to argue a rebuttal with the lecturer. After all this tedium is said and done, and the ghost is gone, the lecturer thinks: Did Poe change my view of his work? No, what he said agrees with what I thought of it. Did he change my unfavorable view of him as a person? No, in fact, now I hate him rather than merely dislike him.

Amusing to relate in just a few sentences, but long and quite tedious and decidedly un-funny in de la Mare's telling.

There's a lot more like that, in particular turns of phrase which are awkward or jarring, and while entertaining to the jaded reader, they likely were not intended to be. I highlighted a bunch of examples on the kindle while reading, but really, this book is not worth taking the trouble to include them.

The greatest weakness of this collection is undoubtedly de la Mare's storytelling ability. It is unclear where most of these meandering tales are going, and once they get there, it is uncertain where one has ended up. This sounds like good psychological horror, but it's not. The reader is left thinking, "Did anything actually happen? Because he didn't describe anything happening. Why did he bother telling this story at all?" In short, you really gotta dig to find anything supernatural in most of these stories, and bereft of that, they have little else to recommend them. ( )

I was disappointed by these stories. Most are written in a style that’s trying so hard to be clever that it grates, and thus dispels whatever atmosphere it might have been building.

Many are so vague about what’s going on in a way that left me baffled—leaving some mystery about whether a story’s events are really supernatural or not (or even whether they really happened rather than being the imaginings of the narrator) is standard ghost story fare, of course, and usually one of the major payoffs for the reader, but generally that sense of mystery lingers after a story where the reader is engaged by the events in the first place.

And that lack of engagement is probably the core of my lack of enthusiasm about these stories. I read most of the stories for a few pages, then put the book down and picked it up again hours or even days later.

I don’t entirely regret reading it, as there are some parts of some stories that were interesting, but I was expecting much more than I actually got from these highly praised stories. ( )