Alice Askew,Claude Askew
A collection of classic supernatural tales from the Edwardian period. Originally published in 1914 between 4 July and 22 August in The Weekly Tale-Teller, the stories were belatedly collected into the current volume in the late 1990s by Jack Adrian. ,This is a collection of eight ghost stories, written by the remarkably prolific husband and wife team of Claude and Alice Askew, centering on Aylmer Vance, an investigator of the supernatural. Dexter, the narrator, meets Vance during a fishing holiday and Vance tells him three ghost stories on successive nights, each story involving Vance more closely in the action. The fourth story brings Dexter himself into the action, and reveals him to have unsuspected clairvoyant powers. The remaining stories feature Vance and Dexter as a sort of Holmes-and-Watson team investigating incidents not all of which prove to have supernatural causes. The final story, "The Fear" is very effective, describing a house in which a general feeling of extreme fear grips the inhabitants at various times and locations; the emotion of fear is effectively evoked and an interesting tale is constructed as Vance and Dexter work to assign the fear "a local habitation and a name."
Horror,Short Stories,Fiction,Paranormal,Ghosts,Horror,Ghost Stories,Mystery,Fantasy,Fantasy,Paranormal,Classics,Speculative Fiction
Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer