"Comedies of Sex and Terror," in Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 54-74.

In the excerpt below, Lassner examines the letter from the dead soldier in "The Demon Lover" and concludes that "the letter is a ghostly artifact, a sign that as a survivor of two wars she has internalized their terrors and guilt."

In "The Demon Lover," justifiably one of Bowen's most famous and widely anthologized stories, a soldier avenges the grim fates of war. Written during World War II, the story embeds the psychological horrors produced by a Blitzed city in a plot about "sex-antagonism," but, in a rare move for Bowen, the haunting presence is a man. The result shows how rage transcends time and space. This man cannot simply murder his lover and be done with it; he instead carries her off in a way that suggests her terror...