'The Property of the Dead'

John Howard's story in The Far Tower: Stories for W.B. Yeats is the first to include an actual tower. The story is set in Ireland between the wars (from a British perspective), though the nameless narrator more accurately describes the period as after the Civil War that heralded the creation of the Free State on a partitioned island.


The narrator is a member of a club where religion and politics are not discussed, and whose members can introduce guests who may be of interest. One such guest is the son of a famous architect who disappeared in strange circumstances after building a country house in a remote area. The house is of such modern design that we learn many critics felt its creator must be mad. 

The key feature of the house is a tower, and through extracts from his journal we discoverer that the architect felt moved to top off the tower with a lunar observatory. Shortly after, the man vanished. Michael, the architect's son, travels to the house and suffers what may be the same fate as his father. The narrator arrives after an apparent earthquake destroys the elaborate dome, stunting the tower, and tries to make sense of what has happened.

Here the mystery is not explained in conventional ghost story terms, though there are overtones of Blackwood's 'A Victim of Higher Space'. The implication is that, like poetry, architecture can open a conduit to a higher reality, one that may prove fateful, or even fatal, but could also offer revelations beyond those of our troubled, mundane world.

So, we're past the halfway mark in this anthology, and I have enjoyed all the stories thus far. It's a tribute to editor Mark Valentine that they are so diverse and diverting. More of this running review very soon!