“It’s all subject to known laws. But the guess, the conjecture: there’s the thrill and the excitement of life. […] You have to guess before you know.”
And that is perhaps why I genuinely often find myself saying ‘I guess’ in my guesstalt reviews! So, I do not depend on this story’s stated ‘cushion of coincidence’ nor on the golfing narrator’s preoccupation with chess problems to the exclusion of what darker, more serious things are portended by such lightsome, entertaining exteriors. This the cosy ghost story by what we often find to be a writer of comforting tales of terror as well as of women called Mapp and Lucia! There is no map without light, I guess. This being the story of a charming woman but one who also harbours an evil reincarnation, terrifying a dog called Fungus as well as the narrator’s wife, but intriguing the narrator’s ‘brother-in-law as guessing guest. This supposedly cosy ghost story indeed holds real evil within it, if you dig deep enough in it.
The sea gave the body up. But, then, until you dig deep enough you cannot hide its coffinful of stated “knees and elbows” within the earth upon which someone once lived to write it …. cast out indeed.
“I felt that I must know that earth had gone to earth,…”
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More reviews by EFB: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2022/08/15/the-other-bed-by-e-f-benson/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
Sick to the Soil.