Could it possibly be true? She seemed such a level-headed girl. It's a perplexing, unsettling document, written longhand in a school notebook. Piers has received this item in the post and wants the narrator to read it. We begin with an unnamed narrator talking about "Daphne Hazel's manuscript," and how the woman was a school friend of the narrator's pal Piers Debourg. That gloriously evocative paperback cover of the titular objects and the British moorland wilds seemingly aswirl with ghosts and fancies, by someone named "Blanchard" (you can just make out signature at bottom right), is a tad misleading only a couple scenes are so tinged with windswept mystery, and I didn't find the story really "mordant" at all, but perhaps if I were a British citizen of the mid-20th century I would have found Ringstones "having or showing a sharp or critical quality biting" as the dictionary definition goes. Akin to the literate pagan chillers of Arthur Machen and set in a near-supernatural landscape such as Algernon Blackwood wrote of, Ringstones is an eerie, understated rumination on the ability of history to insinuate itself into the present in terrible ways. First published in 1951, it was written by British diplomat John William Wall (1910-1989), under his pen name Sarban, by which also wrote two other genre novels, The Sound of His Horn and The Dollmaker ( all published Stateside by Ballantine Books in the early 1960s). It's not even past." So goes one of Faulkner's great quotes and it applies to Ringstones completely.
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