Book Review: How Fear Departed the Long Gallery by E. F. Benson

How Fear Departed the Long Gallery by E. F. Benson and illustrated by Seth

Church-Peveril is the countryside estate home of the Peveril family. It's also home to a plethora of ghostly apparitions, both visual and audible. The Peveril family is okay with the situation since most of the specters are benign and quite familiar. They spooks are old family members from centuries before. The only problematic ones are the twin toddlers who show up in the Long Gallery after sunset. They are not mischievous troublemakers but are genuine terrors who were tragically killed by a relative who wanted to inherit the estate. Whoever sees them dies soon afterwards, often in horrible agony. The Peverils only talk about the twins to warn visitors not to stay in the Long Gallery in the dark. As the title suggests, the problem of the Long Gallery is resolved by the end.

This story is actually a short story, not a full length novel or even a novella. This book is published as part of a series of Christmas-time ghost stories, in the old (18th century) English tradition of telling scary tales on Christmas Eve (hence Dickens' A Christmas Carol). The illustrations are fine but very few, maybe five or six in the whole text. The art follows the style of the cover above. I read this on my Kindle and found the story quite delightful--equal parts humorous and scary with a highly satisfying ending. It was well worth the 99-cent price.

Highly recommended.

I was inspired to read this story by, you guessed it, A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #267. They also discuss Dark Benediction by Walter Miller, which I read as part of an anthology of Miller stories I had to buy because it wasn't available anywhere else (a good story was hard to find!), and Honeysuckle Cottage by P. G. Wodehouse, which I read as part of an anthology edited by Audrey Niffenegger I found at the library (so not hard to find but easy to read just one story and return it guilt free).