Читать книгу Seven Gothic Tales онлайн

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Where, you will ask yourself, puzzled, have I ever encountered such strange slanting beauty of phrase, clothing such arresting but controlled fantasy? As for me, I don't know where.

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Have I given you an idea that the book is filled with a many-colored literary fog in which you can make out no recognizable human shapes? If so I have been exceptionally inept. The light in it is strange, not at all the good straight downward noon-day stare of the every day sun. But it is clear light, and in it we see a series of vigorously presented, outrageously unexpected, sometimes horrifying, but perfectly real human beings. They seem endowed with a sort of legendary intensity of living, almost beyond the possible, but that may be a result of the eerie light in which they are shown; as ordinary people sometimes for a moment or two, although perfectly visible to us as themselves, look legendary and epic in the darkening moment before the bursting of a storm, or in the first glimmer of dawn--in that moment or two during which the sunrise is seen as the miracle it is.