Safe Return Doubtful

Published 1947 – British Literature

This is a great example of what Valancourt do so well, rediscovering a long forgotten novel that reads every bit as well today as it first did.

Originally called The Bracknels this was the Belfast author’s third novel and maybe best summarised as a bold, queer, gothic piece in the style of Poe, Machen, Le Fanu and Henry James.

The Bracknels are an affluent though dysfunctional family living in rural Northern Ireland with older children who haven’t left home, the youngest being 15 year old Denis, immature physically and intellectually and with a brief and disastrous experience at boarding school. His father employs a live-in tutor, Hubert Rusk, and basically leaves every aspect of the boy’s upbringing to him. Though with little in common at first, Rusk is six years older, they become closer and form what emerges as a romantic relationship, while around them the tensions in the Bracknel family build to an almost unbearable level.

In the background meanwhile, strange events occur.. Denis worships at full moon at a sort of naked pagan ritual, there is an unexplainable suicide, and fragments of what happened at boarding school slowly emerge.

Though there is a slow build-up, it seems all of a sudden, midway through the book, the reader notices the spiritual ambiguity and begins to doubt it. It’s as much about human frailty as it is about the supernatural. It has the making of a really great horror novel, though doesn’t quite reach the mark, partly because of such a slow first half. The tension Reid creates is considerable, which makes it so difficult to believe that the novel laid slumbering for so long. Since its reissue in 2014 it has had less than 40 GoodReads scores.

It’s rewarding to find such wonderful books as this, but frustrating that its readership is so small, frustrating also, that although Reid’s earlier two books were gay-themed, this was his last book, and the only one that involved the supernatural.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5