During the 16th century Mrs. Mothersole is
convicted of witchcraft and executed, largely on
the testimony of the owner of Castringham, a
sprawling house that dominates the countryside.
At the moment of her death, Mothersole utters a
vague threat, and a short time later her accuser is
found dead in his bed, his body contorted as
though he had experienced great pain but with no
physical evidence of the cause of his demise. The
room, whose view is obscured by a large ash tree
that stands just outside the window, is immediately
closed up and used only for occasional guests dur-
ing the next several years. That particular tree is
significant because it was a frequent haunt of Mrs.
Mothersole, although no one knows specifically
what attracted her to it.
The years pass until the grandson of the dead
man takes up residence and, unwisely, decides to
use the shunned bedchamber. He sleeps poorly
the first night and decides to have the tree re-
moved in order to facilitate a fresher passage of
air. Unfortunately, he defers the decision until too
late, because the very next night he dies under
circumstances that mirror those surrounding his
grandfather’s fate. We also learn that the witch’s
casket has been exhumed and found to be empty.
Her bones are later discovered inside the tree,
which is destroyed in a fire and which proves to
contain a nest of oversized, venomous spiders of
unknown origin, presumably the witch’s familiars.
James never attempts to describe the actual
method by which the victims were killed, leaving
that to our imagination. The ending is deliberately
understated, which was common in horror fiction
before contemporary writers turned to more explicit
storytelling. It is one of several James stories that are
undeniable classics, although the quality of his work
is consistently excellent. A specialty publishing
house that has been regularly reprinting supernatu-
ral fiction from the early 20th century took as its
name Ash-Tree Press in honor of this classic story.
Audrey RoseFrank DeFelitta(1975)
When the horror field was enjoying its brief heyday
on the bestseller lists in the 1970s and 1980s, al-
most every traditional supernatural theme was res-
urrected in some form or another, everything from
ghost stories and vampires to visitors from other
worlds. Most of these devices were done to death
quickly thanks to repetitious variations of the same
basic story, but other themes such as werewolves
and reincarnation never achieved the same kind of
popularity with writers or readers. One of the rare
exceptions in the latter case was Audrey Rose,one
of four horror novels by Frank DeFelitta.
The Templetons are an ordinary couple who
dote on their young daughter Ivy, with no suspi-
cion that anything out of the ordinary may be hap-
pening around them. When Elliot Hoover shows
up, claiming that Ivy is the reincarnation of his
own daughter, who died a horrible death by fire
following an automobile accident, they dismiss him
as emotionally disturbed and a potential danger.
Five-year-old Audrey Rose died at the precise mo-
ment Ivy was born, and Hoover has decided
through this and other questionable evidence that
his daughter has returned and that they are des-
tined to be reunited. The reader accepts that
Hoover is correct long before the Templetons
come to the same realization, but Hoover is in for
another surprise. His once loving daughter is con-
sumed by rage and pain because of the manner of
her death, and her reincarnated spirit is not look-
ing for love but instead is seeking vengeance.
A common theme in reincarnation stories is
that parallels are inevitable from one life to the
next, and that is the case here. The body of Ivy
Templeton, inhabited by the spirit of Audrey Rose,
is fated to die by fire yet again, this time as the re-
sult of a hypnotic session that causes her to relive
the moment of her previous death. The 1977 film
version, based on the author’s own screenplay, was
quietly effective and much less sensational than
most other horror films of that era. DeFelitta later
wrote a sequel, For Love of Audrey Rose(1982), in
which Audrey Rose’s spirit is reincarnated yet
again, but the melodramatic occultism and an
over-the-top villain prevented it from achieving
the same quiet effectiveness of its predecessor.The Avalon SeriesMarion Zimmer Bradley
and Diana L. Paxson(1982–2004)
Marion Zimmer BRADLEY’s Darkover science fic-
tion series had already become quite popular withThe Avalon Series 11