AUTHOR OF 'THE GO-BETWEEN'. There is to nearly every good writer's imagination a superstitious edge - a sense of fear, a feeling of the essential strangeness of life, a glimpse of the darkened realms of the mind into which reason fails to penetrate. In this fine collection of tales by the author whose best-known work is 'The Go-Between', L.P. Hartley shows himself to be among those writers who have treated the unearthly and the uncanny with the greatest subtlety and skill. His stories, whether of human crimes or of supernatural visitations, shake our reliance on the explicability of an inexplicable universe and sound a note of doom, of irretrievable disaster. With the novelist's sharp eye for detail Hartley vividly portrays the exterior of social life; but he also explores the underlying world of fears and fantasies with a power that is at once compelling and strangely disturbing.