Though it could also be viewed as a story about addiction: to love, to work, to alcohol, to redemption arcs...You are never sure which of these is most harmful to the hero; it's just a good old self-destruction cocktail.

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Another good #EFBenson story last night: The Other Bed. It starts with stunning scenery and weather writing (some of his best), veers off into another of his calling-cards, a few friends discussing the nature of the supernatural, but then gets very dark.

[warning: spoilers below]

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So I’ve come to one of my favourite Benson stories, 'The Man Who Went Too Far'. The narrator visits his friend Frank in his new home in the remote Fawn valley. Since dumping his career in the big city, Frank has shed 15 years and is filled with constant quiet bliss...

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Anyway I seem to have blown my earlier claim that Benson doesn't do strong characters absolutely sky-high, but there you go

Maybe I should've focused on 'Caterpillars' instead.

We should all focus more on caterpillars tbh

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I also like the peculiar indoor/outdoor studio, a highly impractical affair open to the elements at one end, with just a bunch of carpet dumped on the grass. The oddness of this is not commented on by the narrator, which just adds to the vibe of precarity.

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It deals with a man who gets jilted by the woman he loves, and is borderline suicidal, but makes an amazing professional comeback, even agreeing to paint a portrait of this woman since his new-found fame has caused her to circle again. Obviously this ends badly.

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The other story I want to mention is 'The Cat'. This isn't one of his better-known ones, and he's working in arty territory more closely associated with writers like Oliver Onions and Vernon Lee. This doesn't have their level of subtlety, but it's more concise.

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...he usually kept that well away from his ghost stories, and the description of the execution shed, quietly standing there in the prison yard, and the weight of the hanging on the prison staff is more like something from a Julian Symonds crime novel than anything else.

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You get the feeling that Benson, creator of so many urbane, relaxed, outdoorsy characters, had personal experience of the soul-eroding cycle of long-term mental illness, with its endless fake redemptions followed by descents that are all too real, and the way it makes you a target.

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The supernatural horror element is unusually soft here by Benson's standards; the focus of attention is the weird mental/spiritual state the hero is in. And it IS weird. Of course you spend the whole story waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there's more to it than that.

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So on a (slightly) more serious note I said I was going to come back every ten stories and ENTHUSE on my favourite, using the hand-crafted hashtag below to aid muting. Obviously my favourite of the first ten is 'The Room In The Tower' but I've already talked about it so much above

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So apart from that my fave was a tie between "The Confession of Charles Linkworth" and "The Cat". The former is an elegant but still gritty account of a man who gets hanged, but won't lie quiet. Although Benson excelled at the kind of writing that is now described as "cosy"...

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God, I haven't even re-read this story and I'm ALREADY BLATHERING. Better crack out that hashtag

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