At the Farmhouse

Fiction ~ short story
Published in  Hutchinson's Magazine, March 1923
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)
6,770 words
(First read 15/07/2012) 

Available online here.

THE CRITICS

[Benson's] admirers now have [in the collection Mrs Amworth and Other Stories] the chance to reassess a few stories previously underrated - such as At The Farmhouse, Inscrutable Decrees and Expiation.

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' Mrs Amworth, first published in All Hallows magazine, 10/2001

 

Visible and Invisible

Fiction ~ short story collection
First published October 1923

Twelve spook stories, all previously published during the course of 1922-23.  They are as follows [N.B. links lead to blog entries, not to stories]:

"And the Dead Spake ..."
The Outcast
The Horror-Horn

Machaon
Negotium Perambulans

At the Farmhouse
Inscrutable Decrees

The Gardener
Mr Tilly's Séance

Mrs Amworth

In the Tube

Roderick's Story

The book itself is available online here.

THE CRITICS

The reader of the short story will find in Mr E. F. Benson's volume Visible and Invisible, a series of most thrilling tales. Modern science, reincarnation, and many another subject are cleverly employed by Mr Benson to give that touch of verity and of uncanniness that goes to the making of an enthralling story. The creator of Dodo has not lost his cunning as a teller of a good story, and this volume of short stories will add to his reputation.

~The Courier [Dundee], 29/11/1923

This is not the type of book one would care to read in a lonely house on a wintry night. And the Dead Spake, the first tale in the volume, is also the best; it relates how a famous surgeon devised an electrical apparatus which, when connected to the speech-centre in the brain of a corpse, caused the dead to utter intelligible words. Negotium Perambulans is the weird narrative of a walking pestilence, while Mrs Amworth is a terrifying but intriguing study in feminine psychology. Spiritualism is the motif of several stories; ghosts, ghouls, and other uncanny visitants confront us on every page.

~Aberdeen Press and Journal, 31/12/1923

Stories of the supernatural and the terrible. The themes are frightful enough to cause shudders; the treatment in the two or three which we have read is not sufficiently clever to give them first-classrank in their field. It is a difficult type of story, and needs a master.

~The Outlook (US), 16/04/1924

Short stories of the supernatural that succeed in raising every fourth or fifth hair.

~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 05/1924