THE TRAVELLING GRAVE AND OTHER STORIES.
Sauk City: Arkham House, 1948. Octavo, pp. [1-6] [1-3] 4-235 [236: blank] [237: colophon] [238: blank], cloth. First edition. 2047 copies printed. Hartley scattered supernatural material throughout his short story collections, as well as the mainstream novels, such as THE GO-BETWEEN, for which he is better known. The present volume concentrates most of this material in one collection. The author worked mainly as a critic and reviewer, writing fiction on the side and bringing to it a sensibility that fused "a Hobbesian view of human nature [and] a childlike rapture ..." (Sullivan, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, p. 193) Such a fusing of horror and humor shows up in many masters of the fantastic, such as Dickens, Bierce, M. R. James and W. W. Jacobs. "Stylistically, Hartley is peerless, bringing to his genre fiction the same elegant precision that characterizes his major novels. The ghost story, he once wrote, is 'if not the highest, certainly the most exacting form of literary art.' No one was more exacting in the genre than Hartley himself." - ibid, p. 192. Barron (ed), Horror Literature 3-80. Tymn (ed), Horror Literature 4-113. A nearly fine copy in a very good dust jacket with mild wear to the spine ends and corner tips, some toning to the flap edges and rear panel. (25659). Item #25659
Price: $100.00