La habitación de la torre

E. F. Benson (1867-1940) was, along with M. R. James, one of the Victorian masters of the "ghost story", a territory of terror whose exploration was initiated by the great Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Benson and James belonged to the same Cambridge literary society, the Chitchat Society, and they had a good relationship for fifty years. Like James, Benson tries to move away from the classic settings of ruins, passageways and darkness, to insert horror in the most familiar areas of everyday life, where the forces of the unknown lurk. Yet Benson's tales -less scholarly, less elusive, perhaps more disturbing than Dr. James's- insist on exploring the darkest areas of the human psyche, strange phenomena, and the world of dreams, and they manage to transmit through a controlled and resourceful writing their favorite emotion -also ours-: terror.