I discovered Reid's "A Garden God" a number of years ago by way of Walter de la Mare--I am a complete sucker for supernatural fiction written in this time period, with all its preoccupation with queerness in all its guises.
You should definitely check out Denis Bracknel, then. I had an ambivalent recommendation of The Garden God elsenet, but yours sounds stronger.
Mike Flanagan's reinterpretation of "The House of Bly" strikes a similar note in its ending: it's all about lost love and lost innocence and the wild music of a half-shadowed Pan who beckons from a distant wood.
handful_ofdust mentioned the liminality! It made me think of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, where the ghost of Peter Quint names himself "all things strange and bold . . . the riderless horse . . . the hero-highwayman":
I am the smooth world's double face, Mercury's heels feather'd with mischief and a god's deceit. The brittle blandishment of counterfeit. In me secrets, half-formed desires meet. I am the hidden life that stirs when the candle is out; upstairs and down, the footsteps barely heard, the unknown gesture, the soft persistent word, the long sighing flight of the night-wing'd bird.
—with all the trickster's ambiguity that implies. The children loved him and Miss Jessel, and "he liked them pretty," the housekeeper says, "and he had his will, morning and night," and we never see the living man, only the echo and memory and fantasy of him playing out in the twelve-note spindle of endlessly re-running time, and we never know what's true.
no subject
You should definitely check out Denis Bracknel, then. I had an ambivalent recommendation of The Garden God elsenet, but yours sounds stronger.
Mike Flanagan's reinterpretation of "The House of Bly" strikes a similar note in its ending: it's all about lost love and lost innocence and the wild music of a half-shadowed Pan who beckons from a distant wood.
I am the smooth world's double face,
Mercury's heels
feather'd with mischief and a god's deceit.
The brittle blandishment of counterfeit.
In me secrets, half-formed desires meet.
I am the hidden life that stirs
when the candle is out;
upstairs and down, the footsteps barely heard,
the unknown gesture, the soft persistent word,
the long sighing flight of the night-wing'd bird.
—with all the trickster's ambiguity that implies. The children loved him and Miss Jessel, and "he liked them pretty," the housekeeper says, "and he had his will, morning and night," and we never see the living man, only the echo and memory and fantasy of him playing out in the twelve-note spindle of endlessly re-running time, and we never know what's true.