Two seasonal tales of the unco' uncanny.... 'Tis the season, after all. GMW Wemyss takes us to the Wiltshire of his Village Tales novels, where something dark is lurking in a wood older than Stonehenge ... until the duke, as usual, and the Rector, sort it. (Apparently, a case of possession can, actually, be stopped by a brilliant throw in to the wicket. Sometimes....) And Markham Shaw Pyle takes us out 'West of One-Hundredth', to a part of Texas where anything can happen. And does: raising a problem of law and ethics, and the positively howling question, 'When does the beast crowd out the...

Markham Shaw Pyle, historian of the George Washington - Selina Huntingdon correspondence, the events of that portentous year 1937, Congress' decision, four months before Pearl Harbor, to keep the draft (by one vote), and the investigations into the loss of RMS Titanic, looks back on his 2014 heart attack and triple bypass, his recovery, and the missed diagnoses, misdiagnoses, and dangerous consequences of thirty years' untreated illness.
A long essay at once harrowing, hopeful, and hilarious (never put a writer on a morphine drip: he'll hallucinate about typography and book...