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The Demon Lover
A collection of subtle, atmospheric stories set mostly in wartime London, ranging from realistic to the supernatural.
Contents:
In The Square
Sunday Afternoon
The Inherited Clock
The Cheery Soul
Songs My Father Sang Se
The Demon Lover
Careless Talk
The Happy Autumn Fields
Ivy Gripped The Steps
Pink May
Green Holly
Mysterious Kor
Contents:
In The Square
Sunday Afternoon
The Inherited Clock
The Cheery Soul
Songs My Father Sang Se
The Demon Lover
Careless Talk
The Happy Autumn Fields
Ivy Gripped The Steps
Pink May
Green Holly
Mysterious Kor
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1941
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1031 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Bowen
216 books546 followersElizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
November 29, 2025
This is a book of short stories, but the obvious standout is “The Demon Lover.” Set during WWII, London resident Kathleen Drover returns to her previous home to collect her belongings. She finds a letter from her former fiancé who disappeared twenty-five years earlier during World War I and was presumed dead. The letter reminds her of a promise she made to him. I felt a sense of increasing tension, which is accomplished through temporal shifts between past and present. It moves from a dusty, locked house to Kathleen's memories of her possessive fiancé and their final meeting before his departure. The ending leaves it up to the reader to decide if it’s a ghost story or a mental breakdown. It is impressive to accomplish so much in such few words. I enjoyed the entire collection.
February 17, 2017
Elizabeth Bowen was an Anglo-Irish writer who died in 1973 at the age of 73. She is, perhaps, a little like her contemporary V.S. Pritchett; a writers’ writer, whose books are sometimes still in print and are admired by the cognoscenti, but wouldn’t now be widely read. Her atmospheric 1949 novel of wartime London, In the Heat of the Day, is an exception, and was superbly adapted for TV by the late Harold Pinter in 1989. For the most part, however, she is one of those writers we all acknowledge to be excellent; we give a slight mental bow as we see their books in Foyles or Blackwell’s, in tasteful covers from Vintage or Virago; we remind ourselves to read them; and we never do.
I think we should. If we don’t, we’ll miss gems like Bowen’s short story collection, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (known in the US as Ivy Gripped the Steps). It was published at the end of the Second World War, in which the stories were mostly set. Most had been published during the war in various magazines that were then famous but have long disappeared, though they did include The New Yorker. In theory, it’s been out of print for years. In practice, it actually makes up the 1940s section in The Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, which is very much in print – and, in fact, a bit of a bargain.
Bowen’s skill lies in scattering clues through a story that allow us to infer character, or glimpse a larger story, through the agency of our own imagination. The first of these stories, In the Square, begins with a taxi arriving in a bomb-damaged London square at sundown; a man, Rupert, alights and calls on a woman, Magdela, in a house where he sometimes used to dine in peacetime. Little of note happens in nine or ten pages – he is admitted, there is a disjointed conversation, a nephew of the woman appears and disappears – but there is a powerful sense of lives disrupted. The household arrangements are ad hoc; there is dust; the parquet no longer shines. It becomes clear that much that was, is no longer. But that is not stated and does not need to be. "He looked at the empty pattern of chairs around them and said: 'Where are all those people I used to meet?' 'Whom do you mean, exactly?' she said, startled. '…Oh, in different places, different places, you know. I think I have their addresses, if there’s anyone special?'" The nephew, sixteen, wears slippers, smokes openly, and goes out in search of food: “'I expect I’ll pick up something at a Corner House.' …When he went out he did not shut the door behind him, and they could hear him slip-slopping upstairs. 'He’s very independent,' said Magdela. 'But these days I suppose everyone is?'”
In one of the shortest stories, Careless Talk, Joanna arrives from the country and has lunch with friends in a crowded restaurant in which “every European tongue struck its own note, with exclamatory English on top of all.” The male friends arrive late and in uniform. The conversation is disjointed. Joanna is told she is missed in London; why does she not come back? She explains she has nowhere to come back to. “'Oh, my Lord, yes,' he said. 'I did hear about your house. I was so sorry. Completely?'”... Nothing more is said of this. Brief references are made to absent friends who are involved with Poles or Free French. “'I hope it didn’t matter my having told you that…'” It is careless talk, but not really in that sense; it is bright, brittle and inconsequential, and the men leave early to attend to business, while the women worry about three eggs that Joanna has brought from the country, which they have given a waiter for safekeeping. Bowen herself worked through the war and the scene would have been familiar to her.
In another story, Green Holly, several individuals are gathered together in a house in the country; it is Christmas, they have been together some time, and they are bored with each other; indeed they are unprepossessing (one has a large boil; another has baggy, shapeless trousers). But we are told little about them, or the reason why they have been cooped up together in the country for so many months. We learn only that they are experts (“in what, the Censor would not permit me to say”); and now and then one or other is called away, it seems to decode an incoming transmission. Their work is secret but their lives are drab. As they irritate each other, one sees a ghost. The ghost’s provenance would appear to be a crime of passion committed in the house some years earlier and it is thus a counterpoint to the drabness of the living. The whole thing is done with a strong sense of the absurd – it would scarcely work otherwise. The story is meant to, and does, amuse, but it also conveys a strong sense of the dislocated boredom of war – especially in its later stages, which is when one senses this was written.
Not all these stories are set wholly during the war, but two that are not are of times seen in retrospect from wartime. Ivy Gripped the Steps sees a middle-aged man visit an empty house in a South Coast town. The town is in a restricted defence area and the house has not been lived in since early in the war. The man remembers his time there as a child just before the first war, when he played an unintended role in adults’ affairs. This story is especially interesting because it reads as if it may have been the inspiration for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, published six or seven years later.
But the high point of this book is its final story, Mysterious Kôr. Pepita meets her soldier on a night when London is flooded by moonlight. It is clear that they have only tonight. They must spend it in the two-room flatlet that Pepita shares with Callie, another young woman but one with which she plainly has little in common, and who has not troubled to leave for the one night. Instead, Arthur will sleep on the sofa where Pepita normally sleeps, and she will share a bed with Callie. They are in no hurry to go there; but Callie, needy, and filled with a sense of occasion, has set out cocoa for them and is waiting up. As they stand in the bright moonlit night, Pepita recites to Arthur fragments of a poem about a pristine abandoned city, Kôr:
Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand,
Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon...
Bowen does not say where the poem is from, but she does not need to, for her readers would have known. Kôr is a lost city in H. Rider Haggard’s She, then still very popular; it influenced the young Bowen greatly, and she was to name it in a 1947 BBC interview as a favourite book. The poem Mysterious Kôr was not in fact by Rider Haggard himself but by his friend the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang. However, it was printed in several editions of She, and 70 years ago a young woman like Pepita might certainly have known it.
The night does not really end well. They make a late and awkward entry to the flatlet; there is no privacy; they have not even been able to sit quietly during the evening, as every bar is very full and the very pavements so crowded that they are jostled. Wartime London is packed with the soldiers of every nation, and there is no room at the inn. As Pepita finally falls asleep she imagines them walking through the pristine deserted city, untroubled by other humans:
With him she looked this way, that way, down the wide, void, pure streets, between the statues, pillars and shadows, through archways and colonnades. With him she went up the stairs down which nothing but moon came...
Bowen’s narrative and descriptive skills are considerable and her sense of place superb. In Songs My Father Sang Me, for example, there is a nightclub that is “not quite as dark as a church... what lights there were were dissolved in a haze of smoke... on the floor dancers drifted like pairs of vertical fish.” She also has a gift that she shares with another distinguished exponent of the short-story form, V.S. Pritchett – that of equipping her reader with the information they need for the story and no more; there is not an ounce of fat in any of these. A few sparse keys are enough. Arthur may soon be dead but we don’t need to be told that, and we’re not – it is Pepita’s yearning for Kôr that tells us, far more vividly, how they feel. In Careless Talk, Joanna’s London house is a smoking ruin but that is not discussed; her friend frets that the three eggs she has brought her from the country will be stolen, and somehow that tells us more. In In the Square, Magdela and her caller say little, but it is clear that their relation was in a time and place that is gone, and it is now hard for them to communicate. Bowen is a master of allusion.
There is much to enjoy in Bowen’s stories, but for me their strength lies in their universality. To be sure, her work is not modern; the short stories are written in the English of their day, and are rooted in a world that no-one under 80 would remember, and no-one under 50 would understand. But they bring that world very much alive. They do it not through “powerful” descriptions of air raids or bereavement, but through the agency of quite trivial shared human experience. A writer who can do this deserves to be read in perpetuity.
I think we should. If we don’t, we’ll miss gems like Bowen’s short story collection, The Demon Lover and Other Stories (known in the US as Ivy Gripped the Steps). It was published at the end of the Second World War, in which the stories were mostly set. Most had been published during the war in various magazines that were then famous but have long disappeared, though they did include The New Yorker. In theory, it’s been out of print for years. In practice, it actually makes up the 1940s section in The Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, which is very much in print – and, in fact, a bit of a bargain.
Bowen’s skill lies in scattering clues through a story that allow us to infer character, or glimpse a larger story, through the agency of our own imagination. The first of these stories, In the Square, begins with a taxi arriving in a bomb-damaged London square at sundown; a man, Rupert, alights and calls on a woman, Magdela, in a house where he sometimes used to dine in peacetime. Little of note happens in nine or ten pages – he is admitted, there is a disjointed conversation, a nephew of the woman appears and disappears – but there is a powerful sense of lives disrupted. The household arrangements are ad hoc; there is dust; the parquet no longer shines. It becomes clear that much that was, is no longer. But that is not stated and does not need to be. "He looked at the empty pattern of chairs around them and said: 'Where are all those people I used to meet?' 'Whom do you mean, exactly?' she said, startled. '…Oh, in different places, different places, you know. I think I have their addresses, if there’s anyone special?'" The nephew, sixteen, wears slippers, smokes openly, and goes out in search of food: “'I expect I’ll pick up something at a Corner House.' …When he went out he did not shut the door behind him, and they could hear him slip-slopping upstairs. 'He’s very independent,' said Magdela. 'But these days I suppose everyone is?'”
In one of the shortest stories, Careless Talk, Joanna arrives from the country and has lunch with friends in a crowded restaurant in which “every European tongue struck its own note, with exclamatory English on top of all.” The male friends arrive late and in uniform. The conversation is disjointed. Joanna is told she is missed in London; why does she not come back? She explains she has nowhere to come back to. “'Oh, my Lord, yes,' he said. 'I did hear about your house. I was so sorry. Completely?'”... Nothing more is said of this. Brief references are made to absent friends who are involved with Poles or Free French. “'I hope it didn’t matter my having told you that…'” It is careless talk, but not really in that sense; it is bright, brittle and inconsequential, and the men leave early to attend to business, while the women worry about three eggs that Joanna has brought from the country, which they have given a waiter for safekeeping. Bowen herself worked through the war and the scene would have been familiar to her.
In another story, Green Holly, several individuals are gathered together in a house in the country; it is Christmas, they have been together some time, and they are bored with each other; indeed they are unprepossessing (one has a large boil; another has baggy, shapeless trousers). But we are told little about them, or the reason why they have been cooped up together in the country for so many months. We learn only that they are experts (“in what, the Censor would not permit me to say”); and now and then one or other is called away, it seems to decode an incoming transmission. Their work is secret but their lives are drab. As they irritate each other, one sees a ghost. The ghost’s provenance would appear to be a crime of passion committed in the house some years earlier and it is thus a counterpoint to the drabness of the living. The whole thing is done with a strong sense of the absurd – it would scarcely work otherwise. The story is meant to, and does, amuse, but it also conveys a strong sense of the dislocated boredom of war – especially in its later stages, which is when one senses this was written.
Not all these stories are set wholly during the war, but two that are not are of times seen in retrospect from wartime. Ivy Gripped the Steps sees a middle-aged man visit an empty house in a South Coast town. The town is in a restricted defence area and the house has not been lived in since early in the war. The man remembers his time there as a child just before the first war, when he played an unintended role in adults’ affairs. This story is especially interesting because it reads as if it may have been the inspiration for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, published six or seven years later.
But the high point of this book is its final story, Mysterious Kôr. Pepita meets her soldier on a night when London is flooded by moonlight. It is clear that they have only tonight. They must spend it in the two-room flatlet that Pepita shares with Callie, another young woman but one with which she plainly has little in common, and who has not troubled to leave for the one night. Instead, Arthur will sleep on the sofa where Pepita normally sleeps, and she will share a bed with Callie. They are in no hurry to go there; but Callie, needy, and filled with a sense of occasion, has set out cocoa for them and is waiting up. As they stand in the bright moonlit night, Pepita recites to Arthur fragments of a poem about a pristine abandoned city, Kôr:
Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand,
Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon...
Bowen does not say where the poem is from, but she does not need to, for her readers would have known. Kôr is a lost city in H. Rider Haggard’s She, then still very popular; it influenced the young Bowen greatly, and she was to name it in a 1947 BBC interview as a favourite book. The poem Mysterious Kôr was not in fact by Rider Haggard himself but by his friend the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang. However, it was printed in several editions of She, and 70 years ago a young woman like Pepita might certainly have known it.
The night does not really end well. They make a late and awkward entry to the flatlet; there is no privacy; they have not even been able to sit quietly during the evening, as every bar is very full and the very pavements so crowded that they are jostled. Wartime London is packed with the soldiers of every nation, and there is no room at the inn. As Pepita finally falls asleep she imagines them walking through the pristine deserted city, untroubled by other humans:
With him she looked this way, that way, down the wide, void, pure streets, between the statues, pillars and shadows, through archways and colonnades. With him she went up the stairs down which nothing but moon came...
Bowen’s narrative and descriptive skills are considerable and her sense of place superb. In Songs My Father Sang Me, for example, there is a nightclub that is “not quite as dark as a church... what lights there were were dissolved in a haze of smoke... on the floor dancers drifted like pairs of vertical fish.” She also has a gift that she shares with another distinguished exponent of the short-story form, V.S. Pritchett – that of equipping her reader with the information they need for the story and no more; there is not an ounce of fat in any of these. A few sparse keys are enough. Arthur may soon be dead but we don’t need to be told that, and we’re not – it is Pepita’s yearning for Kôr that tells us, far more vividly, how they feel. In Careless Talk, Joanna’s London house is a smoking ruin but that is not discussed; her friend frets that the three eggs she has brought her from the country will be stolen, and somehow that tells us more. In In the Square, Magdela and her caller say little, but it is clear that their relation was in a time and place that is gone, and it is now hard for them to communicate. Bowen is a master of allusion.
There is much to enjoy in Bowen’s stories, but for me their strength lies in their universality. To be sure, her work is not modern; the short stories are written in the English of their day, and are rooted in a world that no-one under 80 would remember, and no-one under 50 would understand. But they bring that world very much alive. They do it not through “powerful” descriptions of air raids or bereavement, but through the agency of quite trivial shared human experience. A writer who can do this deserves to be read in perpetuity.
January 13, 2023
Review of the story The Demon Lover only.
Mrs Drover is in London to gather some things from the closed up family home (they are living in the country during the blitz). There she finds a letter, unstamped and dated that day, signed K, her fiancé who went missing in WW1. Is this a ghost story, or a stalker story, or is Mrs Drover just stressed out because of the war? I’m not sure but I enjoyed reading it, the ending is surprisingly freaky.
Mrs Drover is in London to gather some things from the closed up family home (they are living in the country during the blitz). There she finds a letter, unstamped and dated that day, signed K, her fiancé who went missing in WW1. Is this a ghost story, or a stalker story, or is Mrs Drover just stressed out because of the war? I’m not sure but I enjoyed reading it, the ending is surprisingly freaky.
May 11, 2016
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007517gDescription: Mrs Drover returns to her old London house after the Blitz to find a letter waiting. Stars Maggie Steed and Jenny Howe.
November 22, 2021
Disturbometer: 3 out of 10.
Another one on the "Most disturbing stories ever" list. I personally didn't find it very disturbing, though.
Story about a woman returning to her house in London after it had been closed up with the bombing of London in WWII. All is not as it seems as her past returns to haunt her.
I think that perhaps knowing in advance that a story is supposed to be disturbing removes some of the impact? I saw this one's ending coming as well. Maybe I've read too many short stories with little twists in my life, but there you have it...
Actual rating: 3 and a half stars.
Another one on the "Most disturbing stories ever" list. I personally didn't find it very disturbing, though.
Story about a woman returning to her house in London after it had been closed up with the bombing of London in WWII. All is not as it seems as her past returns to haunt her.
I think that perhaps knowing in advance that a story is supposed to be disturbing removes some of the impact? I saw this one's ending coming as well. Maybe I've read too many short stories with little twists in my life, but there you have it...
Actual rating: 3 and a half stars.
May 24, 2019
Sort of open-ended, but that's fine with me.
I forced myself to listen three times to see if I had missed something. I hadn’t.
Scary? No, not really.
Intriguing, yet not enough to grip your teeth into.
Too short, too quick.
Pedestrian.
The audiobook narration by Anne Dover is fine. It is not her fault the story is merely OK!
************************
The Death of the Heart 4 stars
The House in Paris 3 stars
The Demon Lover 2 stars
I forced myself to listen three times to see if I had missed something. I hadn’t.
Scary? No, not really.
Intriguing, yet not enough to grip your teeth into.
Too short, too quick.
Pedestrian.
The audiobook narration by Anne Dover is fine. It is not her fault the story is merely OK!
************************
The Death of the Heart 4 stars
The House in Paris 3 stars
The Demon Lover 2 stars
February 4, 2026
if "awh, hell naw" was a story. love the artful use of the poem from the same name, though.
May 15, 2016
From BBC radio 4 Extra:
Mrs Drover returns to her old London house after the Blitz to find a letter waiting. Stars Maggie Steed and Jenny Howe.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007517g
Mrs Drover returns to her old London house after the Blitz to find a letter waiting. Stars Maggie Steed and Jenny Howe.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007517g
April 27, 2025
Her short stories should be read. There is something to say for how she can create a sense of uneasiness, nostalgia, grief or horror in only a few pages.
The demon lover is a ghostly story or a psychological breakdown due to guilt? what is the ending? where has she been taken?
The Inherited Clock is sad and unsettling with elements of supernatural. A clock is given upon her aunt's death but it unlocks repressed memories of an incident. Guilt echoes throughout. The clock is not unsettling because it is a clock but what it represents and what they (Clara and Paul - two cousins) caused.
It is also poignantly sad reference to the passage of time slowly drifting away from Clara with nothing to show. She - just like her aunt whom she inherited the clock- waiting around, time ticking, 9 years and affair partner believing Henry will eventually leave his wife for her.
Songs My Father Sang To Me
Just sad and nostalgic. That melancholia that strikes. The war connects all these stories as there is always ( I think) a reference to it. A man who has no sense of identity after the war and only knows two tunes one about love and one about war. There's a mystery that haunts the narrative of why he left and where he is? but it's like Pandoras box until he is dead he is a love and if he is alive he is everywhere and nowhere
There are other stories but those I thought were great
The demon lover is a ghostly story or a psychological breakdown due to guilt? what is the ending? where has she been taken?
The Inherited Clock is sad and unsettling with elements of supernatural. A clock is given upon her aunt's death but it unlocks repressed memories of an incident. Guilt echoes throughout. The clock is not unsettling because it is a clock but what it represents and what they (Clara and Paul - two cousins) caused.
It is also poignantly sad reference to the passage of time slowly drifting away from Clara with nothing to show. She - just like her aunt whom she inherited the clock- waiting around, time ticking, 9 years and affair partner believing Henry will eventually leave his wife for her.
Songs My Father Sang To Me
Just sad and nostalgic. That melancholia that strikes. The war connects all these stories as there is always ( I think) a reference to it. A man who has no sense of identity after the war and only knows two tunes one about love and one about war. There's a mystery that haunts the narrative of why he left and where he is? but it's like Pandoras box until he is dead he is a love and if he is alive he is everywhere and nowhere
There are other stories but those I thought were great
March 3, 2017
When I was told in school i was going to be reading this short story, I wasn't sure what to feel because the tittle suggested to me a sort of fantasyish story. But I had a feeling it wasn't because my teacher always tells me how a lot of times In literature a tittle is just a play-on-words because unless you read this you wouldn't be able to guess the story's basis. Me personally I had to read this story over like 20 times and I'm not over exaggerating either! But that was mostly due to the fact that I couldn't consecrate in class so when I finally went home and read it every time it got little more clearer and when I finally understood it I really enjoyed it. But when I looked up the background of it I enjoyed it even more because the story is based of world war 2 in London I think but I really enjoyed how it's based off a folklore which was pretty cool. And I also enjoyed how the author put pieces of her life in the story to make it stronger. Overall I really liked this story and I might just read some of Elizabeth's other pieces of literature for fun.
May 30, 2017
These stories weren't scary in the way that I expected. The ghosts here are of the more nuanced variety, memories and patterns of behavior that haunt the characters as they try to live something like normal lives in England during World War II. It took me a while to figure out how to read these. So many of them just seem to stop without actually ending. But reading the book as a whole, even though it was not written as such but rather assembled from individual, previously published stories, revealed a broader significance. These stories don't include any of the war itself, just those lives lived on the periphery of the bloodshed, in a kind of suspended time between air raids. As Bowen writes, this is a world that has become precarious, prone to being uncreated in a moment. How does one live in a world like this?
In the postscript, Bowen suggests that these stories could in future make up a kind of emotional history of the war. I believe that they do indeed constitute this kind of history, and I expect that the stories' ghosts will continue to haunt me.
In the postscript, Bowen suggests that these stories could in future make up a kind of emotional history of the war. I believe that they do indeed constitute this kind of history, and I expect that the stories' ghosts will continue to haunt me.
March 17, 2020
I really liked this one. There were hints and clues .... The period of the story, the trauma of war, the dislocation, buried shame and fear and guilt, she doesn't remember his face (you can't run away from a face you don't remember),her selective memory, its shreds, she still feels bound in a suffocating way (plighted by the sinister troth). Was the letter real? Was the ghost real (that sounds silly... )? It was real to her, may be she was dreaming or perhaps she was neurotic....but the point was perhaps to get us, the readers travel back to the war weary minds of normal (prosaic) people, trying to revisit their homes and hearts and feeling traumatised by it all. This was what I figured...my take. Would love to hear if I got this totally wong.
October 24, 2023
“You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.”
What a treat of a story! Though a contemporary of Woolf and Yeats, I had never encountered Bowen’s writing before. This story was assigned to me for a class, and I loved it! Right up my alley: the thread of the gothic, the free indirect discourse, the scraps of war, an unfulfilled romance. But is it romance? What is it?
I have no idea. And I love it.
What a treat of a story! Though a contemporary of Woolf and Yeats, I had never encountered Bowen’s writing before. This story was assigned to me for a class, and I loved it! Right up my alley: the thread of the gothic, the free indirect discourse, the scraps of war, an unfulfilled romance. But is it romance? What is it?
I have no idea. And I love it.
November 22, 2015
I felt I could relate to this story, which is why I found it so chilling. When in a house alone, I feel cautious and scared of the empty rooms, as if something is about to make its way out of the floors or walls and get me. I'm also old enough to know now that that wouldn't happen. At least if it did, I'd have the outside world and the safety of strangers, right..?
June 7, 2016
struggling with these stories - my own prejudices, I think - so middle class, set in abandoned country houses or bombed out London mansions, full of convoluted sentences. However the stories are also full of light and beauty and some wonderful descriptions.. I will persevere.
.. I enjoyed this on the whole, despite the struggle. Some superb touches and insights into character. More later...
.. I enjoyed this on the whole, despite the struggle. Some superb touches and insights into character. More later...
September 25, 2022
He was never kind to me, not really. I don’t remember him kind at all. Mother said he never considered me. He was set on me, that was what it was—not love. Not love, not meaning a person well. What did he do, to make me promise like that? I can’t remember—But she found that she could.
July 2, 2017
Well... an interesting story, even though the end leaves many questions to the reader as long as it is open ended and lets you draw your own conclusions!!!
October 27, 2013
Bowen creates a foreboding atmosphere like a champ and the story can be enjoyed both in a literal and metaphorical way. Neatly crafted and chilling.
July 12, 2016
Descubriendo a Elizabeth Bowen...
Inquietante, fantasmagórica y gótica. Muy buen relato.
Inquietante, fantasmagórica y gótica. Muy buen relato.
August 21, 2024
3.8*
Recull de relats que abasten des de comèdies de costums fins a contes de suspens, tots amb una atmòsfera quelcom fosca I inhòspita, protagonitzats per un personatges força esnobs que desperten poca empatia. La prosa de Bowen és clara, tanmateix els seus efectes són complexos i els seus relats són reflexes brillants de realitat, d'un món reconeixible però inassolible, o com escriu l'Eulàlia Lledó al pròleg, alguns dels relats són "un subtil si és, no és i d'altres, un escruixidor si és, no és."
Recull de relats que abasten des de comèdies de costums fins a contes de suspens, tots amb una atmòsfera quelcom fosca I inhòspita, protagonitzats per un personatges força esnobs que desperten poca empatia. La prosa de Bowen és clara, tanmateix els seus efectes són complexos i els seus relats són reflexes brillants de realitat, d'un món reconeixible però inassolible, o com escriu l'Eulàlia Lledó al pròleg, alguns dels relats són "un subtil si és, no és i d'altres, un escruixidor si és, no és."
March 16, 2021
3'5/5
February 6, 2025
absolutely psychotic
December 21, 2013
‘The Demon Lover’ is a very short story, suitable for a small gap of time you want to fill or procrastinate in. I had to read this for a seminar as a companion to Hiroshima Mon Amour’s screenplay and I’m glad I did.
The premise is simple: a woman goes to collect a few of her belongings to her old house and finds there a mysterious letter for her.
In the beginning, you think you know where this is going, afterwards you start guessing just for the fun of it, but then, the end leaves you blinking perplexedly and stranded on a beach of confusion and amazement, no matter what you had been thinking before.
I have yet to read more of Bowen, but this was certainly a good start. The reason I didn’t give it more stars is simply that it was too short to make a great impact.
The premise is simple: a woman goes to collect a few of her belongings to her old house and finds there a mysterious letter for her.
In the beginning, you think you know where this is going, afterwards you start guessing just for the fun of it, but then, the end leaves you blinking perplexedly and stranded on a beach of confusion and amazement, no matter what you had been thinking before.
I have yet to read more of Bowen, but this was certainly a good start. The reason I didn’t give it more stars is simply that it was too short to make a great impact.
October 16, 2015
I read it in my English 4 class. It was ambiguous and I liked it because we did an assignment where we write a different essay and give what we wrote to another classmate and they would continue the story. It was fun. I would give it a 4.5/5.
November 16, 2016
Supposedly Shirley Jackson's inspiration for The Daemon Lover. James Harris of the cloven foot. Excellent. In Jackson's he leaves. In Bowen's, he returns. Both are horrifying. The 5 stars is for the story itself. As I have read it in her Collected Works, I would give the CollectedWorks 4 stars.
June 7, 2011
This short story was nice. It was very ominous. I recommend this for those who enjoy classic short stories.
February 28, 2014
Such a joy to analyze!
June 10, 2018
Decent, made quite an impression in very little time.
July 19, 2025
Nosferatu if he had gotten his way
September 3, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Horror Short Stories #Anthologies #International Horror (Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa)
This short story hit me like a cold gust of wartime London air when I first read it in 2017. Unlike Crawford’s decadent gothic (The Dead Smile) or du Maurier’s uncanny intimacy (The Doll), Bowen’s tale operates in the realm of psychological haunting, woven seamlessly into the bleak, fractured world of the Blitz.
This isn’t horror draped in cobwebs or dripping with melodrama. It’s horror that feels like it belongs to history itself—a ghost story stitched into the very fabric of wartime memory.
The premise is deceptively simple: a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Drover, returns to her bomb-damaged home to collect belongings. What she finds is a letter—silent, accusatory, promising the return of a fiancé long dead, a man she had promised herself to decades earlier. The letter insists upon a meeting, and its unnerving certainty plunges her into a spiraling dread. There are no vampires, no ancestral curses, no grotesque dolls—only the suggestion that memory, repression, and guilt have a way of reasserting themselves with the force of the supernatural.
Reading it alongside du Maurier’s The Doll, I was struck by how both stories hinge on female autonomy and the spectre of unwanted claims. But where du Maurier externalises obsession into an uncanny object, Bowen internalises it into memory, a revenant shaped not of flesh or wood but of broken promises. Mrs. Drover’s terror is not just that of encountering a ghostly fiancé—it’s the horror of realising that history has claws, that our past selves can make commitments our present selves cannot escape.
Bowen’s style is unmistakably modernist—compressed, elliptical, and heavy with implication. There are silences between her sentences that feel like gaps in memory, like craters in a bombed-out street. In this, she resembles Maupassant in The Diary of a Madman: both suggest more than they reveal, leaving the reader suspended between psychological realism and supernatural dread. Unlike Crawford, who paints terror in lush brushstrokes, Bowen uses economy—each word sharpened like shrapnel.
What fascinated me in 2017, and still does, is how The Demon Lover doubles as a war story. The Blitz is more than background; it is the ghost itself, the silent companion to every Londoner who survived it. Mrs. Drover’s return to her abandoned house is not just a domestic errand—it is an encounter with the ruins of both a city and a self.
The supernatural fiancé may be real, or he may be nothing more than the crystallisation of trauma. Bowen never tips her hand, and that ambiguity is precisely what gives the story its chill.
In comparison to Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow or Akutagawa’s Hell Screen, Bowen’s story is almost austere. There are no grotesque deaths, no vivid spectacles. And yet the final moments—Mrs. Drover entering a cab, the driver turning with “a malevolent face”—carry a shock that rivals any gothic climax. It’s not spectacle but inevitability that terrifies us. If Quiroga terrifies through the body’s vulnerability, Bowen terrifies through the soul’s entrapment in promises it cannot revoke.
Placed beside Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, the contrast becomes even sharper. Tolstoy draws on folklore, turning vampires into metaphors of family loyalty turned predatory. Bowen, instead, distills horror into the psychology of an individual life intersecting with historical trauma. Folklore haunts the village; trauma haunts the city street. Both forms reveal how horror adapts to context, but Bowen’s is remarkable in its subtlety.
Reading The Demon Lover in 2017, amid the noise of contemporary fears—pandemics, political unrest, ecological anxiety—I couldn’t help but feel its resonance. Bowen teaches us that horror doesn’t need a monster. Sometimes, the simple act of memory resurfacing at the wrong time is enough. The terror of a letter, handwritten yet impossibly timely, is that it suggests we are never free of what we once were.
In the canon of 20th-century ghost stories, Bowen’s work stands out for its fusion of psychological realism and supernatural unease. It’s a story that lingers not because of what it shows but because of what it withholds.
Walking away from it, I found myself glancing at ordinary letters, ordinary returns to old spaces, with a flicker of dread. And that, I think, is the story’s achievement—it transforms the everyday into a site of uncanny reckoning.
This short story hit me like a cold gust of wartime London air when I first read it in 2017. Unlike Crawford’s decadent gothic (The Dead Smile) or du Maurier’s uncanny intimacy (The Doll), Bowen’s tale operates in the realm of psychological haunting, woven seamlessly into the bleak, fractured world of the Blitz.
This isn’t horror draped in cobwebs or dripping with melodrama. It’s horror that feels like it belongs to history itself—a ghost story stitched into the very fabric of wartime memory.
The premise is deceptively simple: a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Drover, returns to her bomb-damaged home to collect belongings. What she finds is a letter—silent, accusatory, promising the return of a fiancé long dead, a man she had promised herself to decades earlier. The letter insists upon a meeting, and its unnerving certainty plunges her into a spiraling dread. There are no vampires, no ancestral curses, no grotesque dolls—only the suggestion that memory, repression, and guilt have a way of reasserting themselves with the force of the supernatural.
Reading it alongside du Maurier’s The Doll, I was struck by how both stories hinge on female autonomy and the spectre of unwanted claims. But where du Maurier externalises obsession into an uncanny object, Bowen internalises it into memory, a revenant shaped not of flesh or wood but of broken promises. Mrs. Drover’s terror is not just that of encountering a ghostly fiancé—it’s the horror of realising that history has claws, that our past selves can make commitments our present selves cannot escape.
Bowen’s style is unmistakably modernist—compressed, elliptical, and heavy with implication. There are silences between her sentences that feel like gaps in memory, like craters in a bombed-out street. In this, she resembles Maupassant in The Diary of a Madman: both suggest more than they reveal, leaving the reader suspended between psychological realism and supernatural dread. Unlike Crawford, who paints terror in lush brushstrokes, Bowen uses economy—each word sharpened like shrapnel.
What fascinated me in 2017, and still does, is how The Demon Lover doubles as a war story. The Blitz is more than background; it is the ghost itself, the silent companion to every Londoner who survived it. Mrs. Drover’s return to her abandoned house is not just a domestic errand—it is an encounter with the ruins of both a city and a self.
The supernatural fiancé may be real, or he may be nothing more than the crystallisation of trauma. Bowen never tips her hand, and that ambiguity is precisely what gives the story its chill.
In comparison to Quiroga’s The Feather Pillow or Akutagawa’s Hell Screen, Bowen’s story is almost austere. There are no grotesque deaths, no vivid spectacles. And yet the final moments—Mrs. Drover entering a cab, the driver turning with “a malevolent face”—carry a shock that rivals any gothic climax. It’s not spectacle but inevitability that terrifies us. If Quiroga terrifies through the body’s vulnerability, Bowen terrifies through the soul’s entrapment in promises it cannot revoke.
Placed beside Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, the contrast becomes even sharper. Tolstoy draws on folklore, turning vampires into metaphors of family loyalty turned predatory. Bowen, instead, distills horror into the psychology of an individual life intersecting with historical trauma. Folklore haunts the village; trauma haunts the city street. Both forms reveal how horror adapts to context, but Bowen’s is remarkable in its subtlety.
Reading The Demon Lover in 2017, amid the noise of contemporary fears—pandemics, political unrest, ecological anxiety—I couldn’t help but feel its resonance. Bowen teaches us that horror doesn’t need a monster. Sometimes, the simple act of memory resurfacing at the wrong time is enough. The terror of a letter, handwritten yet impossibly timely, is that it suggests we are never free of what we once were.
In the canon of 20th-century ghost stories, Bowen’s work stands out for its fusion of psychological realism and supernatural unease. It’s a story that lingers not because of what it shows but because of what it withholds.
Walking away from it, I found myself glancing at ordinary letters, ordinary returns to old spaces, with a flicker of dread. And that, I think, is the story’s achievement—it transforms the everyday into a site of uncanny reckoning.
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