Eltonsbrody

Among the most versatile of all living novelists, Mr. Mittelholzer, after his controversially experimental novel "Latticed Echoes", now gives us a study in the macabre in the manner of his earlier ghost story "My Bones and My Flute". But "Eltonsbrody" is not a ghost story. It is an attempt to paint in words a picture of an old house and of the landscape immediately surrounding it. Every house has a spirit of its own, and old houses especially seem to possess an atmosphere expressive of the people who have inhabited them and of the dramas that have been enacted in them throughout the years. Some houses leave more "exciting" impressions than others - wield a more strange and oppressive influence, and such a house is Eltonsbrody in the hilly north-eastern corner of the island of Barbados. A young English painter, Woodsley, on holiday in the island, is invited by the charming old lady who owns and occupies Eltonsbrody to spend a few days in her home. He settles down to paint a study of the house in its setting of casuarina and mahogany trees, only to discover that he is in the midst of odd happenings - happenings as odd as his hostess and her servants. The house lives up to his early impression of it, producing not only strange and blood-curdling events but yielding up eventually some grisly relics.