The supernaturals seem to be having a far better time: the devil hosts witches’ bacchanals in the cemetery, which is a “bleak and touching township” where they exhume and consume corpses (a practice which comes up again in the final story, Wolf-Alice, where the perpetrator acts not with exultation but with misery). Human society is punitive, suspicious and credulous, its puritanical patriarchy shot through with a hypocritical sexualisation: women suspected of being witches are stripped before being stoned to death. Interaction with the uncanny offers no thrill of contact but instead compounds local paranoia and misery. The ghastly supernatural intermingles with the bleak natural: vampires are warded off with garlic, children are born with second sight. Life is “harsh, brief, poor” and flowers don’t grow. A short tale of not even three pages, it sketches a familiar Gothic pastoral scene in frighteningly flippant shorthand: we are in a “Northern country” of “cold weather”, “dark and smoky” interiors, “cold hearts” and “wild beasts in the forest”. The first story, The Werewolf, is told with abrupt, brittle relish.
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