The Demon Lover

These stories weren't scary in the way that I expected. The ghosts here are of the more nuanced variety, memories and patterns of behavior that haunt the characters as they try to live something like normal lives in England during World War II. It took me a while to figure out how to read these. So many of them just seem to stop without actually ending. But reading the book as a whole, even though it was not written as such but rather assembled from individual, previously published stories, revealed a broader significance. These stories don't include any of the war itself, just those lives lived on the periphery of the bloodshed, in a kind of suspended time between air raids. As Bowen writes, this is a world that has become precarious, show more prone to being uncreated in a moment. How does one live in a world like this?

In the postscript, Bowen suggests that these stories could in future make up a kind of emotional history of the war. I believe that they do indeed constitute this kind of history, and I expect that the stories' ghosts will continue to haunt me. show less

These stories were written in London during the war (from 1941 to 1944) and WWII is the backdrop to some but not all of them. Some have supernatural or horror elements, but they are more psychological. They are good stories, all quite short and all atmospheric.

Low impact stories with a subtle atmosphere set in the hoe Front, World War II, UK.Mostly among faded upper classes, with properties in London or countryside all either requisitioned or bombed out or otherwise abandoned, Only the title story has an actual ghost but really all are haunted in a 20th century secular way. Some are a bit inconclusive and her style is sometimes a bit convoluted or awkward, in a way that recalls Henry James.