I'm excited about this week's library find (though to be honest I'm almost always excited about the books I bring home!). This one is a ghost story, and I do love a good ghost story. I was looking at books by Rose Macaulay, and somehow this one caught my eye. It's quite unassuming as you can see with it's plain spine, and very unattractive orange cover (excuse the pun--but uninviting!). It must have been well loved in its day, however, as that thick orange cover means it was rebound at some point.
The Uninvited. PR 6025 A11 U55. That's it. That's all it has to recommend itself, but it was enough to make me want to at least pull it from its spot on the shelf and crack it open.
Title page: The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle. Doubleday, Doran and Comapany, Inc. Garden City, New York, 1942. Better. I'm curious. The 1940s interest me.
The story begins: Chapter I, Cliff End.
"The car seemed to share the buoyancy of the morning, humming along over the moorland roads and taking the twisting hills in top."
"I was glad we had taken down the hood. There was a heady exuberance in the air. The sky was a high, light haze; the trees and hedges were sprayed with young colour; birds were busy and lambs ran lolloping and bleating about the hills. Pamela pulled her hat off, otherwise the breeze would have sent it flying. It was her doing that we were on the road before nine in the morning and heading for the sea."
Yes, "heading for the sea" is what ultimately made me check it out in order to look for more information on the story and author. I'd like to be heading for the sea, too.
Macardle was an Irish author and historian and wrote a number of books about the Irish War of Independence. She also wrote several novels including Uneasy Freehold, or The Uninvited as it was known in the US. It was on the NYT bestseller list for several weeks in 1942 and it was later made into a movie. Journalist Roderick Fitzgerald and his sister Pamela are looking for a house in the countryside where he can write his novel and she take care of the garden and household duties. The house they find, via a friend, is known to be haunted, but they decide that might well be one of its charms. Of course there will be a house party, nocturnal visitors and a séance, but I'm not sure how convincingly scary it is. The NYT reviewer seemed suitably impressed by it.
"It would be quite unfair to this astute ghost story to reveal much of the plot. It is a clever and original one, with a solution which may be guessed some time before the end, and that is a good thing, because it would be too confounding if it were sprung without warning. As it is, it seems satisfactory. If not quite up to creepy thrills of the problem. But then any ghost story with a supernatural solution will not quite satisfy the completely materialistic."
A little bit ambivalent there, but it could be a fun read. One to keep in mind for Carl's RIP Challenge maybe?