Westall employs a variety of popular fiction subgenres—science fiction, realism, horror—in all five of his stories, with his preference clearly being for the horrific mode, which he expresses above all as a psychological state. To make this state and the situation all the more realistic, Westall focuses attention on the sensory or visceral aspects of experience; that is, he tends to emphasize one sense or another in each story. For example, in "Hitch-hiker," it is the visual which predominates: note especially his careful description of Joan's appearance. On the other hand, it is the sense of sound— the "white noise" of flight, the roar of weapons, the screams of death—which comes to the fore in "Blackham's Wimpey," just as it is the olfactory sense which becomes prevalent towards the end of "Fred, Alice, and Aunty Lou".

Just as he...