THE HIGHBOY by Alison Lurie

“The highboy had not moved; but now it looked heavy and sullen, and seemed to have developed a kind of vestigial face. The brass pulls of the two top drawers formed the half-shut eyes of this face, and the fluted columns between them was its long thin nose; the ornamental brass keyhole of the full-length drawer below supplied a pursed, tight mouth. Under its curved mahogany tricorne hat, it had a mean, calculating expression,…[…] The irritating thing was that now I’d seen the unpleasant face of the highboy, it was there every time…”

….being the high point of this story in which I got confused about the human characters within which fiction array this bird-like piece of furniture featured, a haunting pareidolia and sense of potential anthropomorphic retribution or selfful protection from an otherwise inanimate object. No wonder it outshone the characters it controlled! It even controlled the author writing about it, I sensed. And now it has come into counterpoint with a rare reader of this story and yearns to reside in some heaven’s museum of a receptive brain as a sort of posterity. Or hell’s? (My family had a highboy in the 1950s when I was a boy, but we called it a tallboy. Not sure what that signifies. In any event, I recall that tallboy was plain and unassuming.)

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Full context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/twentieth-century-ghost-stories/