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English author perhaps best known nowadays (outside Gothic circles, at least) as the author of Mapp and Lucia, Benson wrote a number of fine ghost stories. Sites:
E. F. Benson Web Site
Features a biographical essay and other discussions of Benson's work (not limited to his supernaturalist fiction), a bibliography, and a great deal more. [Amber Tatnall]
The E. F. Benson Web Page
Features a bibliography, images, links.
The Benson Base
A fan page, with links to other Benson fan pages. [Paul Bines]
Brief biographical note
[Wikipedia]
E. F. Benson Society
Primarily analog.
Biographical note
From the website of the Rye tourism board; Benson lived in Rye as an adult, and set much of his famous Mapp & Lucia material in a fictionalized version of Rye.
Biographical note
[Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartleby]
E. F. Benson
Supernaturalist bibliography with book cover images. [Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Tartarus Press]
Bibliography
Includes brief biographical note. [FantasticFiction]
Etexts: Works are in PDF from HorrorMasters unless otherwise indicated.
"At Abdul Ali's Grave"
"Between the Lights" "The Bus-Conductor" "The Cat "Caterpillars" "The Confession of Charles Linkworth" "'And the Dead Spake'" "The Dust Cloud" "The Face" Included in Benson's collection Spook Stories (1928), this story compares very interestingly to Charlotte Smith's "SONNET XLIV: Written in the churchyard at Middleton in Sussex," at least in terms of major imagery. But while Benson's story seems fairly traditional in its use of premonitory dreams (and nightmares), its "graveyard school" imagery, and its construction of suspense and surprise, it's curiously modernist in its refusal to supply the expected explanation.
- no known etext
"How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery" "The Gardener" "Gavon's Eve" "The Horror-Horn" "The House with the Brick-Kiln" "In the Tube" "The Man Who Went Too Far" "Mr. Tilly’s Séance" "Mrs. Amworth" A rather standard vampire tale in most regards, although Benson's take on vampires is out of ordinary run of such things: possessed by evil spirits, vampires first live as ordinary humans -- living off human blood, yes, but also eating normally and going about in sunlight and generally living ordinary human lives except for their blood-sucking-- and then, when they die, they become Undead vampires, behaving pretty much as the stereotypical vampire, and need to be dispatched by a stake (or, in this case, pick-axe) through the heart). The image of Mrs. Amworth "floating" outside the upper-story bedroom window of her victim is similar to a moment in Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.
"Negotium Perambulans"
"The Other Bed" "The Outcast" "Outside the Door" "The Room in the Tower" [1912] (30K) [Gaslight] "The Shootings Of Achnaleish" "The Terror by Night" "The Thing in the Hall" |
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