Crooked Houses - 'The Reader of the Sands' by Mark Valentine

When you are familiar with a writer's work you know what to expect - more or less. Mark Valentine is of the Macheneque school of weird fiction, which means he sets out to inspire awe and wonder, the sense of mystery almost unveiled but always just out of reach. If the effect is also disturbing, so be it, but that's not the primary objective. 'The Reader of the Sands' illustrates this perfectly. 

Three very different characters - not unlike Arthur Machen''s Three Impostors, in a way - converge on an isolated coastal house. Their host invites them to deploy their unique talents, real or pretended, to address the enigma of strange patterns appearing in the shifting sands. These recurring patterns seem a little too complex, and a little too frequent, to be attributed wholly to the winds and the waves. In a kind of séance the guests and the host do succeed in transcending the everyday world but seem to risk being permanently cast adrift. A young woman, a maker of sandglasses, seeks to save them from a strange fate. 

As always, this story offers the pleasures of erudition and cool, civilized prose. I was not entirely sure if it qualified as a haunted house story, but after a bit of pondering I decided that it did. The house is haunted to a considerable degree, in fact. Nature itself is not the 'ghost', not exactly, but the story does take the idea of spirits of place to a different level.