Mrs Midnight and Other Stories
Language: English
Pages: 381
ISBN: B006VE1I9Q
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A TV reality show host helps to restore an East End music hall and uncovers the dreadful secret of Mrs Midnight and her Animal Comedians. . . . A historian travels to Switzerland to ghost the autobiography of an exiled Balkan king and encounters a sinister cult. . . . The Master of an Oxford college tries to introduce a dubious piece of modern sculpture into his college chapel with dire consequences. . . . A strange meeting takes place on a playing field between an officer on leave from the trenches and his former headmaster. . . .
The settings and characters in Reggie Oliver’s fifth collection of ‘strange’ stories are as varied and unusual as ever, though, as in previous volumes, the theatre forms the milieu of a number of his tales. But the theatres are not just English ones, in the provinces and the West End: one is on the Black Sea; another in post-colonial Kenya. Themes are equally varied, but underlying all is a deep sense of the spiritual under-currents just below the surface of everyday existence, and the precariousness of ‘normality’.
Reggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
Mrs Midnight and Other Stories contains: "Mrs Midnight", "Countess Otho", "Meeting with Mike", "The Dancer in the Dark", "Mr Pigsny", "The Brighton Redemption", "You Have Nothing to Fear", "The Philosophy of the Damned", "The Mortlake Manuscript", "The Look", "The Giacometti Crucifixion","A Piece of Elsewhere", "Minos or Rhadamanthus".
spaces to sleep in, I liked it. Auntie Winnie was apologetic not about the room’s size, but that it couldn’t be at the front with its ‘grand view’ of the Shad valley. Actually, I preferred to look out of my window at the little back garden that sloped steeply upwards towards a hill dotted with sheep. I felt safer with this: I was closed snugly in rather than being victimised by grandiose panoramas. The garden itself was barely more than a rectangle of lawn with a few shrubs and a treelike device
on cue, we both began to laugh. MR PIGSNY I It was, I suppose, a typical gangster’s funeral. There were the extravagantly insincere floral tributes: TO REG, A DIAMOND GEEZER in white carnations; there was ‘My Way’ played by the reluctant organist; there was the coffin borne by six burly, black-coated thugs into a church which Reg would never have entered in his lifetime except to marry or to bury. And why was I, Housman Professor of Classical Epigraphy at Cambridge University,
told us that art is a lie which tells us the truth?’ ‘Piss off, Pigsny,’ said Den, and again I felt at one with him. I could not have put it better myself. ‘Who’s the little shit who drew that crap? I’ll ring his bastard neck for him.’ ‘The artist in question is beyond even your reach, Mr McCall,’ said Pigsny, putting the print back into his portfolio and preparing to leave the room. Den barred his way. He said: ‘What’s the point of all this, Pigsny? Tell me what you want. Come on, out with
limitations, chose never to read. He was attending to his own history. By the year 1923 Asmatov with his wife and daughter had found their way to England, and he had become the Front of House Manager of the Bijou Theatre in Godalming. It was a modest modern building which boasted, for the greater part of the year, a permanent repertory company offering the good citizens of Godalming a pleasant diet of comedies, farces and thrillers. Every week there was a new play which was, at the same time,
those who go after a penniless prophet. He knew who I was, but I remember the small frown that always furrowed his brow whenever he spoke to me. ‘It was we—the camp followers—who had to beg for food to feed us all, we who got the smallest share. Sometimes there was a feast for us if the Nazarene had healed the sick in a village, but we had the lowest place in it. Our Master would sometimes look at us questioningly as if he wondered why we were there. The twelve for the most part treated us with