Snowfall

Elizabeth Walter, already known well for her novels, here presents five stories centred on the supra-natural. The range of settings is wide: a Welsh cottage, a new housing estate, a provincial museum, an island off the French coast; but common to each, and characteristic of her story-telling, is the accurate observation of people, places and things which creates an atmosphere of such normality that the manifestation of supernatural forces is all the more frightening and believable. Elizabeth Walter's interest in these phenomena is directly related to her interest in people: You can believe what you like, she says, about these kinds of experiences — dismiss them as illusion, believe them to be caused by the genuinely supernatural, or merely by something buried in the unconscious mind of those who experience them; what cannot fail to be interesting is their effect on the people involved in them. As to her own explanation of these happenings, Elizabeth Walter does not commit herself: "The supernatural may or may not exist; its effects exist indisputably...."