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    The Watcher by the Threshold
    The Watcher by the Threshold
    The Watcher by the Threshold
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Watcher by the Threshold

    Written by John Buchan

    Narrated by Cathy Dobson

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    John Buchan (1875 - 1940) was a scottish writer, barrister, Member of Parliament and later become Baron Tweedsmuir and Govenor-General of Canada. While he was most famous for adventure stories, such as The Thirty-nine Steps, he was also popular for his supernatural horror stories, of which The Watcher by the Threshold is a prime example.

    When Harry Grey receives a mysterious summons from his cousin Sybil to visit her and her husband Robert Ladlaw at their remote scottish estate, he is taken aback by the urgency of the postscript. "For Heaven's sake come and see us!" she writes. "Bob is terribly ill, and I am crazy. Come at once." And then to finish: "Don't bother about bringing doctors. It is not their business."When Grey undertakes the dismal journey to the House of More where the Ladlaws live, he finds a situation far more mysterious and terrifying than he could ever have imagined.

    Ladlaw is in the grips of a terrible possession... and Sybil is at her wits end. Ladlaw's split personality is so bizarre that it is sometimes hard to grasp who has the upper hand.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Door Consulting
    Release dateJan 1, 2015
    ISBN9781467600873
    Author

    John Buchan

    John Buchan (1875–1940) was educated at Glasgow University and Brasenose College, Oxford. He became a barrister, member of Parliament, soldier, publisher, and governor general of Canada. Of the over one hundred books he published during his lifetime, he is best remembered for his adventure and spy stories, especially The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

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    Reviews for The Watcher by the Threshold

    3/5

    11 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A collection of tales about Scotland, some eerie, some nicely mythological, and some just plain moralistic. I quite enjoyed "No-Man's Land," if only for its incredibly stereotypical treatment of its subject, and "The Watcher By the Threshold" is a nicely creepy story of possession with a somewhat disappointing ending. Buchan tries to be a little too moralistic with his endings overall, I think; evil is too often vanquished for his stories to be properly horrifying.
    • 3/5
      From the dedication: "It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories".

      Of the five stories in this volume, the first four fall broadly into the category of supernatural fiction. No-Man's-Land sees the traveller venturing into a bleak Scottish wilderness in which, according to folk rumour, something sinister lurks behind tales of the Brownies. In The Far Islands a vision of a pathway into the west haunts a man from his childhood on the Scottish coast through public school and rowing at Oxford to the battlefield. The Watcher by the Threshold is a tale in the classic mode of possession by an evil spirit, with the amusing involvement of the stolid local minister, Mr Oliphant. The Outgoing of the Tide tells of a wicked witch who seeks to corrupt her daughter. The last tale, Fountainblue, stands out oddly, being more or less a straight tale of romantic rivalry and adventure on the rocky coastline of Scotland. The whole collection is very much a period piece from the late Victorian world of the Boer War. The Scots vocabulary of the rural characters is unsurprising enough, but the main narrative also contains a fair sprinkling of partly comprehensible expressions such as "forwandered" or "dreeing his weird".

      MB 5-vii-2013