Books: Horror Stories

LOOK AT ALL THOSE ROSES—Elizabeth Bowen—Knopf ($2.50).

Most of these 19 stories exhale a cold horror for middle-class English life. As diagnoses of that horror they are sometimes subtle, brilliant, beautifully written; as often supersubtle, over-clever, strangled in preciosity. At best their sinister quality is superb; at worst they deal melodramatically with jilted servants, out-of-season hotels, loveless homes, other social and psychological frigidities so overused that they might almost people a 20th-century, air-conditioned Castle of Otranto. In her almost frantic straining after artistry, Miss Bowen often frustrates her first-rate talent. But she is one of few writers alive who comes near mastering the difficult short-story form. Some stories:

> Her Table Spread: a moronic, statuesque Irish heiress fancies herself in love with a sailor.

> Tears, Idle Tears: an icily sentimental story of a child’s uncontrollable weeping and of its obscure cause and cure.

> The Disinherited: a medley of unsouled and sterile Britons who try, hopelessly, to amuse themselves at a party.

> A Walk in the Woods: city people, in shy crowds, invade autumnal nature.

> Oh, Madam . . . (bound to be popular): in a crudely invented monologue, a servant shows her mistress through a freshly bombed house.

> The Girl With the Stoop: A sinister young cripple tries to entoil a dim town girl.

> The Easter Egg Party: Two kindly spinsters try to help a frighteningly coldhearted, remote child.

> The Last Night in the Old Home: a mixture of genuine and forced heartbreak which contains this line, spoken by a vapid, bitchy daughter: “That’s the difficulty . . . there’s nothing much they can do. Oh, mother is trying to rub out the places where we all used to be measured against the door.”

> Summer Night: the finest of them, is a subtle story using only one dubious trick —a deaf woman’s memory—and telling of a night-crazy little girl, a faded husband, a pathetically ill-matched rendezvous, a tortured, aging male virgin.