Setting the Scene
The opening line of the story “On the Brighton Road” is stepped in metaphor and this construction serves a purpose. Setting—specifically the climate of the season—is particularly important to the narrative as it rolls forward and the use of figurative language to commence the tale corresponds to its deeply symbolic nature:
“Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world of snow.”
Metaphorical Ghosts
Make no mistake, this book of ghost stories is about the reality—such as that may be—of ghosts. But the first-person narrator of “Christmas Meeting” is an elderly woman whose introduction unifies the concept of metaphorical ghosts and literal ghosts—whatever that may mean:
“It give me an uncanny feeling, sitting alone in my `furnished room’, with my head full of ghosts, and the room full of voices of the past. It’s a drowning feeling—all the Christmases of the past coming back in a mad jumble.”
Dread
“Harry” is a story which gains its power from the slowly intensifying feeling of dread which creeps over the first person narrator. She is the adoptive mother of a young girl who speaks to an invisible friend named Harry whom she claims insists he is her brother. The portrait of a generative sense of foreboding is made palpable through the metaphorical language directed both outward and inward:
“I went to the windows to draw her curtains. Golden shadows and long strips of sunshine in the garden. Then, again like a dream, the long thin clear-cut shadow of a boy near white roses. Like a mad woman I opened the window and shouted:
`Harry! Harry!’”
Haunted Houses
As one might expect, this collection includes more than one haunted domicile. In one case, the domicile is haunted cruise ship. “Playmates” is a story that plays much closer to convention by situating its story of dead imaginary friends played with by a young girl within more traditional confines:
“The rooms were high and well lighted, but the house wore and air of depression as if it were a live thing unable to shake off some ancient fit of melancholy.”
Sea Creature
That story taking place upon a ship is titled “The Upper Berth” and the climax occurs quite literally in the titular cabin. Everything moves ominously toward the revelation of the mystery and when it comes, it is of such an inhuman and otherworldly presence that only metaphorical language is up to the job of description:
“It was something ghostly, horrible beyond words and it moved in my grip. It was like the body of a man long drowned, and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living”
