Alienation and Apathy

Most of the characters in these stories are men who are unhappily married, desperately lonely, on the path to madness, or have dully accepted their fate in life. They look to the past to see where they have gone wrong, and some have such traumatic experiences in childhood they are unable to live a normal life afterwards, as in Phillip of The Basement Room.

Even the children seem to be disconnected from reality. The twins Peter and Francis, in The End of the Party, are almost one soul in two bodies, and that soul is detached from the other children. Trevor of The Destructors is driven by inner demons to destroy something beautiful. William of Under the Garden was a marvelously creative child who grew up to be a boring self-centered man. Each story features a solitary soul who is living in quiet desperation on some...