The Laughing Mill, and Other Stories

A collection of short tales that imagines how the impossible might intrude upon ordinary life, often via quietly uncanny incidents and suggestive supernatural touches. Set in intimate domestic and coastal scenes, the stories feature melancholic reveries, mysterious heirlooms, and occasional moments of ironic play, favoring atmosphere and tasteful invention over shock or moralizing. Characters are sketched with sufficient realism to make the marvellous feel plausible, and the volume mixes subtly eerie pieces with a lighter jeu d’esprit, many having first appeared in periodicals and united here by an aesthetic interest in the marvelous rather than in heavy psychological or social analysis.