Written With My Left Hand

Perhaps best known for two much-admired tales, the evocative ghost story ‘Whessoe’ and the grimly humorous horror tour-de-force ‘Curious Adventure of Mr Bond’, Nugent Barker (1888-1955) remains something of an enigma. Although rated highly by contemporaries: the 1929 edition of Edward J. O’Brien’s anthology The Best British Stories is dedicated to Barker: little is known of his life, and these twenty-one tales, first collected in 1950, are thought to represent the sum total of Barker’s literary output. As Douglas Anderson notes in his Foreword, Barker ranks alongside fellow twentieth-century exponents of the strange story, Walter de la Mare and John Metcalfe. But what makes Barker unique as a writer is the originality and diversity of his imagination.The stories collected here range widely, from the Poe-esque Parisian sophistication of ‘The Strange Disappearance of Monsieur Charbo’, to the sly and strangely touching Sussex folk-wisdom of ‘Stanley Hutchinson’; from the dislocated, dreamlike horror of ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’ to the idyllic, time-travelling nostalgia of ‘The Thorn’.These powerfully-written stories, long out of print, deserve to be much better known. They will be relished by all those who appreciate the very best classic supernatural literature.