Horror! Horror! Horror! by Edith Olivier – #ABookADayInMay – Day 13

Under normal circumstances, I would run in the other direction from a book with ‘horror’ in the title, let alone three times. But I also love Edith Olivier, and was interested when Snuggly Books (!) brought out a slim volume of three of Olivier’s short stories in the horror genre. Interested enough to buy it and, as is so often the way of things, read it two years later (and it took about half an hour to read). Olivier is best-known for The Love-Child, a novella that I wrote a substantial about of my doctoral thesis on, and which I was delighted to bring back into print through the British Library Women Writers series. But I had either forgotten, or never knew, that she also wrote horror stories – and this book collects three of them, written in 1934-5: ‘The Caretaker’s Story’, ‘Dead Men’s Bones’, and ‘The Night Nurse’s Story’. They’re so short that it’s hard to give an account of them without giving everything away. In brief, the first one concerns someone returning to his house that…