Wednesday 25 April 2012

The House with the Brick-kiln

Fiction ~ short story
Published in London Magazine, November or December 1908
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
4,450 words
(First read 25/04/2012) 

The ingredients of an E. F. Benson spook story:
(1) Two gents in an old rented house in the English countryside
(2) The house is haunted, obviously
(3) The two gents get haunted ...
(4) ... the narrator is a bit of a wuss; his pal is made of sterner stuff
(5) The haunting gets so bad they flee the house
(6) They find out the ghost was of a former tenant, who murdered someone ~
And there you have The House with the Brick-kiln ... and a whole host of other yarns.  Utterly formulaic; entirely predictable; crashingly dull.
Still, don't let me put you off [!]: you can read it online here.

For an alternative version of the EFB Spook Story Formula see here.

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