Walter de La Mare - Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism

De la Mare was also a significant writer of ghost stories. John Clute comments that "in his long career, de la Mare seems to have published about 100 stories, of which about eighty-five have been collected. At least forty of these have supernatural content". Many of de la Mare's ghost stories can be found in the collections Eight Tales, The Riddle and Other Stories, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, On the Edge and The Wind Blows Over. His complete short stories have now been published in three volumes issued by Giles de la Mare Publishers, London. De la Mare also wrote two supernatural novels, Henry Brocken (1904) and The Return (1910). For children, de la Mare wrote the fairy tale The Three Mulla Mulgars (1910, AKA The Three Royal Monkeys), praised by literary historian Julia Briggs as a "neglected masterpiece" and by critic Brian Stableford as a "classic animal fantasy". Gary William Crawford has described de la Mare's supernatural fiction for adults as being "among the finest to appear in the first half of this century". Boucher and McComas, however, dismissed his 1949 Collected Tales, saying "we freely admit we find Mr de la Mare's self-consciously subtle wordiness unreadable."

Several writers of supernatural fiction, including Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell, have cited de la Mare's fiction as inspirational.