AMONG THE QUIET FOLKS
By
John Moore has been writing for many years, for the most part pleasantly, pastorally, about England and recently quite successfully in his The Waters Under the Earth (1965). These short stories are full of lych gates, missionaries, retired Captains, and the landscapes of England and her colonies, but for the first time the mildly bizarre displaces nostalgia. The title story tells of a child's affection for another child's grave; an eccentric aunt has a compost heap with grim remains; a missionary unknowingly serves a terrible god; an innocent girl is sent to the stake by a cat; and other ordinary people are similarly, unexpectedly, surprised by life. Some of these stories are scarcely more than sketches; they suggest Roald Dahl--faintly; and they are sometimes as troubling, and haunting, as an unidentifiable experience.