This wasn’t quite fantasy-horror, but more of a cross between Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Kafka’s The Trial.

Reynard Langrish, former soldier declared physically unfit during WWII, lives with his mother just outside a village outside the town where he works at a bank. Above all, he feels increasingly untethered to reality: his senses are dulled, and the world feels washed-out. One night, a particularly dark and stormy one, an army captain called Archer calls at his house, claiming to have taken a wrong turn and asking for directions. The two strike up an awkward, almost compulsory friendship. As Langrish’ encounters become increasingly dreamlike, he soon finds himself training to join a British Army battalion that is being raised in secret.

This was a weird read: not quite horror, not quite Weird Fiction, not quite suspense. Horror tropes that are seemingly used straight (cf. the dark and stormy night when Langrish and Archer meet) are treated as irrelevancies; the nightmarish quality present in the Weird is primarily due to a regimented and unquestioned army bureaucracy; and the dreamlike reality flows along a little too predictably for the suspense to be gripping. This short novel is situated in the periphery of several different genres but isn’t really at home with any of them.

At 140 pages, this is a quick but unsettling read, as much for its contents as for its genre indecisiveness. ( )

Taking its title from a line in Beowulf, British author Jocelyn Brooke's The Image of a Drawn Sword is a disturbing, suspenseful and much neglected novel of fantastic horror. Though utterly its own thing, it belongs in the unsettling company of Franz Kafka's The Castle, Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. It also has ties to the tale of Reynard the Fox and - with its detailed evocations of the Kentish wilds and hints of an occult, parallel reality - to the work of Arthur Machen. The sorrowful mystery of psychic disintegration, of swarming menace is masterfully developed. See also the author's The Dog at Clambercrown for more of the same, slams on Proust and tea with the mafia. Brooke has also authored a biography of Ronald Firbank and issued an anthology of Denton Welch's writings. ( )