Vier korte bizarre verhalen. Aandachtig lezen is nodig om niet in de verhalen te verdwalen die natuurlijk bedoeld zijn om mysterieus over te komen. ( )

In her last years, Hella Haasse often mentioned a white folder of unpublished stories that had gone missing somewhere. Her editor, Patricia de Groot, didn't succeed in finding the missing folder, but she has managed to piece together four early short stories from stray pages that she found here and there in Haasse's papers. They all seem to have been written between 1938 and 1950, and are in a style de Groot describes (quoting an essay by Rosemarie Buikema) as "homely gothic". Strange things happen, either in mysterious old houses or in the protagonist's subconscious, we're never allowed to be quite sure which.

In "Een Verhaal" ("A story"), the earliest piece, a Robinson Crusoe figure tells us how he fled to an uninhabited island after seeing a dance in which the true natures of his fellow humans seemed to be revealed. The title story is a ghost story set in a 17th-century Amsterdam house, in which a visitor is bitten by a ghostly dog. In "Landschap in olieverf" the protagonist finds herself stepping into an idyllic painting where one of her new husband's ancestors is holding out a rose for her, and in "Caulder Hall" a visitor to a Scottish B&B is strangely reassured by the nocturnal sounds coming from the neighbouring room — until she finds out that it was empty. It seems to have been written in 1950, before the Calder Hall nuclear power station was built, so the title was probably just an unlucky coincidence.

Not my favourite kind of short story, but very well done, lovely economic writing where every phrase is doing something important. ( )