• Selected by Richard V. Hirst

While celebrated during his lifetime, de la Mare isn’t widely read today, perhaps because his proclivity for rather heightened, maximal prose which often felt even old-fashioned even at the time of he was working. De la Mare’s most popular work remains a poem, ‘The Listeners’, which takes a gentle, wistful view of the supernatural.

However, his fiction, at its strongest, casts a stranger, icier eye on the terrain, informed by an interest in the aberrant and inexplicable and, for me, ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ skirts close to perfection.

As with the best ghost stories, the plot itself is deeply uneventful. A man called Withers recounts a series of encounters with Seaton, an unpopular schoolmate, and his overbearing aunt. Seaton tells him his aunt has the power to commune with the dead, something Withers initially greets with scepticism, writing the two of them off as a family of oddballs, only to reconsider following an odd but materially uneventful encounter with them in adulthood.

The story’s potency lies in its casual presentation of the ghostly and the psychological as profoundly connected, with the murky, malignant atmosphere of Seaton’s home appearing to be a by-product of a reciprocal relationship between cruelty, madness, and an infernal force.

First published in The Riddle and Other Stories, 1923 – read it online here