Sublime

ribald

Hitchcockian protagonist,

extreme paucity of expression.

One of my favourite spooky stories is The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706) by Daniel Defoe (the Robinson Crusoe man). Really, this is the first modern ghost story in the sense that it happens in a homely domestic setting, and without any supernatural build-up.

facsimile

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened—one of these young women bore a child.

Maybe Ma was never coming home.