Not just humanity, our narrator can't even walk home through the woods without stumbling over a bunny "with glazing eyes and the stab of the ferret tooth behind her ear." Secret after secret is unveiled in paroxysms of terror and hatred, but babbling madness usually raises more questions than it answers.
dearly loves the handling of the grim, the uncanny, and the morbid he is a master in the painting of suffering humanity, suffering as a shuttle tossed by the hand of Fate." (Star, 1903, review of the later London edition). It was well enough described by the Star reviewer in Christchurch, New Zealand: "The author. Doubtless the innocuous title is partly to blame. 247).Ī murder mystery soaked in horror and the uncanny, missed by bibliographers for a century. "Who ever see a pink warsp wi' a mouth like a purse and blue inside?" (p. A gravedigger, talking with the hero about macabre doings in the churchyard, is frightened by a wasp. The book is shot through with dozens of little touches - gruesome ditties and feverish babblings, references to folkloristic magic and superstition - that build up a sense of the uncanny and dreadful. "By lowering factory and grimy wall by squalid streets peeled of uncleanliness in the teeth of the bitter blast by lowbrowed taverns, that gushed red on us a moment and were gone, he sped on with crooked paces, and I followed" (p. Not the least of its virtues are stylistic. Its themes are weighty and its plot construction is intricate and polished. The atmosphere of the book is soaked in a "high spectral gloom." The overtly supernatural incidents are few, but to call the book's weirdness "subdued" would be grossly inaccurate.
What's not generally known is that the Mill of Silence is a fully fledged weird tale replete with curses, fate, prophecies, a magnificently haunted room, and a pair of ghosts, one sinister, one the other kind.
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