A visitor from an alternate world is glimpsed in a snowy churchyard; a box contains a creature that resembles (but not quite closely enough) a human being; two schoolboys spend a holiday with a sinister aunt. In many of these stories, ordinary settings in the English countryside possess a hallucinatory quality – a sense of meaning beyond our grasp, and events running out of kilter with reality.

Like all the best ghost stories, these haunting tales offer an enduring sense of mystery with an explanation that remains tantalizingly out of reach. They grow richer with each reading – lingering in the mind and becoming ever more sinister, and more profound.