My eyes are doors. The moon walks through them

Commended to the attention of my friendlist: Forrest Reid's Denis Bracknel (1947). Technically a revision of Reid's third novel The Bracknels (1911), although so thoroughly rewritten both structurally and stylistically that Reid's prefatory note accurately describes it as "practically a new book," it is a queer Gothic that reads like the love child of Arthur Machen and Henry James. The house belongs to the Bracknels, a dysfunctionally upper-middle-class family in the countryside of Northern Ireland; the boy who meets it is the sturdy, sensible Hubert Rusk, engaged fresh out of Cambridge as a tutor for the youngest son of the family, the physically delicate and mentally sensitive Denis, whose experience of public school was memorably brief and disastrous. Despite the five or six years between them and their sharply different worldviews, the tutor and his pupil rapidly form a romantic friendship, while all around them the tensions of the Bracknel family boil to the surface with the arrival of the stranger, who not being Terence Stamp in Teorema (1968) is horribly embarrassed to find himself witness to and object of so many emotional scenes. The father is a bully, the mother self-renouncing, the elder son a wastrel, the sisters stifled and rivalrous: and Denis Bracknel worships the moon. "I don't think of any particular god or goddess . . . I mean I don't think of names. There is something behind them all." He does it honor at a hollow stone beside a well beside a hawthorn which he found after dreaming of it. He has made sacrifice to it there. Other fragments of strangeness shift beyond the lights of the story, a pattern that never quite settles where the reader or the characters can see it in full: a suicide, a nightmare, an incomplete allusion to something that happened at school. "It sounds like a fairy tale, and it was before he took ill, before all the row—" Every time the novel begins to behave like a mimetic chronicle of an Edwardian family, of which it would have made a good example if the author had felt like it, there's the title character who looks like a changeling or Dionysos—slight, dark, Eastern-eyed—knowing himself haunted and safe by his altar, feeling a pale cold figure bend down out of the night and kiss him full on the mouth. Just in case the reader isn't sure how far to trust the mood of supernatural ambiguity, the narrative name-checks James and Le Fanu. If it is going to end badly, though, human failure as much as any haunting will have to play a part. It annoys me that it was Reid's last novel—finished just in time to be published posthumously—because it looks as though most of his others, although queer, were also realist, and Denis Bracknel decidedly is not. I read it over two nights, on either side of ashlyme linking me the excellent impromptu soundtrack of Belbury Poly's The Gone Away (2020). Also I slept for five hours, which is not enough, but I still feel better.

P.S. For e-book-reading people, selkie points out that this novel is in fact "cheap as chips on Kindle," which I hope makes it easier to get hold of.