Published 1921 by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London. Doesn't contain as many stories as most of Buchan's weird collections but I was entranced by the cover.

Somewhat maudlin batch of supernatural tales highlighted by title tale. No-Man's Land is the runner up, but a good first half of real terror and breathlessness, and not a little poignancy, gives way to cheap melodrama to finish. There's a couple of supernatural weepers that might hold up if the romance and man's manliness thing wasn't played up so hard. ( )

A collection of tales about Scotland, some eerie, some nicely mythological, and some just plain moralistic. I quite enjoyed "No-Man's Land," if only for its incredibly stereotypical treatment of its subject, and "The Watcher By the Threshold" is a nicely creepy story of possession with a somewhat disappointing ending. Buchan tries to be a little too moralistic with his endings overall, I think; evil is too often vanquished for his stories to be properly horrifying. ( )

From the dedication: "It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories".

Of the five stories in this volume, the first four fall broadly into the category of supernatural fiction. No-Man's-Land sees the traveller venturing into a bleak Scottish wilderness in which, according to folk rumour, something sinister lurks behind tales of the Brownies. In The Far Islands a vision of a pathway into the west haunts a man from his childhood on the Scottish coast through public school and rowing at Oxford to the battlefield. The Watcher by the Threshold is a tale in the classic mode of possession by an evil spirit, with the amusing involvement of the stolid local minister, Mr Oliphant. The Outgoing of the Tide tells of a wicked witch who seeks to corrupt her daughter. The last tale, Fountainblue, stands out oddly, being more or less a straight tale of romantic rivalry and adventure on the rocky coastline of Scotland. The whole collection is very much a period piece from the late Victorian world of the Boer War. The Scots vocabulary of the rural characters is unsurprising enough, but the main narrative also contains a fair sprinkling of partly comprehensible expressions such as "forwandered" or "dreeing his weird".

MB 5-vii-2013 ( )