The Demon Lover

A story from Night in the Front Line, a collection of Second World War short stories.

One of Elizabeth Bowen’s most well-known stories, The Demon Lover sees Mrs Drover return to her abandoned London home, her family having settled into evacuated life in the countryside, to find a letter waiting for her.

©1941 Elizabeth Bowen (P)2019 Soundings

Deliciously Wicked

I first encountered Elizabeth Bowen in John Banville's New York Review of Books essay "A Master of Hidden Things" which praised her "greatness in the short-story form." I searched for an audiobook of her short stories or novels, but only found this one story, "The Demon Lover." If you're going to be known by one story, this is a good one. It is haunting, well crafted, like a story out of Edgar Allan Poe. Bowen exhibits a superb sense of place in her description of a shuttered manor home where a mysterious letter shows up from a lady's departed lover. Bowen's storytelling is hypnotic. It pulled me in. The great reveal at the end was horrific. I got a chuckle and listened to her story again and again. Both Bowen's storytelling and Anne Dover's narration are excellent.

The one drawback is that there is only one Bowen story available. I want to listen to more examples of her "greatness in the short-story form."