Riassunto
Riassunto di La cosa del lago
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love old houses with secrets, voices in the dark and romances that grow without a single glimpse of a face. Fans of early twentieth century ghost stories and gentle humour will feel at home.
Che cos’è questo libro
The Thing from the Lake is a supernatural romance by Eleanor M. Ingram, an American novelist who died in 1921. It is set in the years just after the First World War and is told by Roger Locke, a lame New York composer of popular songs. On a spring whim he buys a run-down farm in Connecticut, and in a single night the old house gives him a woman's severed braid, a witch's tale told in the dark, and a fear he cannot name.
What follows mixes a ghost story, a love story and a warm family comedy. A hidden woman speaks to Roger only at night. Something monstrous presses at his bedroom window. Downstairs, his shy young cousin and her country-bred husband build a sunny life that has nothing to do with phantoms. Roger tells all of it with honest doubt, dry humour and a growing sense that he has stepped across a border.
In this summary you will meet the people, follow the story up to its last crisis, and see what the book is really about. The ending stays hidden until you choose to read it. So let us begin where Roger does, in a spring rain, in front of a house that seems to be calling out to him.
In questo riassunto
- 1A house that begs to be boughtFree
- 2A braid, a knife and a tale
- 3Phillida's secret marriage
- 4A sunny house and a returning dark
- 5The pomander and the lake
- 6Searching the countryside for a name
- 7Love that grows in the dark
- 8The book that waits in the bookcase
- 9What the story is really about
Punto chiave 1 di 9
A house that begs to be bought
The story opens in a gray spring rain. Roger Locke, a city man with plenty of money from musical comedies, sits in his car outside a boxlike farmhouse in Connecticut. A real-estate agent calls it a bargain, with maples, an orchard and a five-acre lake. Roger feels at once that the house is crying out for rescue, and he decides to buy it before he has even gone inside.
The house is partly furnished. In a large north bedroom stands an old rosewood bed with carved pineapples on its posts, and Roger claims the room at first sight. From its window he sees the lake, which is really a shallow marsh because the old dam is down. He dislikes it with a strength that surprises him. The agent promises that a rebuilt dam will make it a pretty lake, and Roger says they will try.
The narrator warns us early that the house is no ordinary haunted one. It is a house under siege, ringed round as Prague was in an old legend, when an army of ghosts camped outside its walls. That odd promise hangs over the opening chapters. Roger does not yet know what is gathering outside, and the reader senses it before he does.
That evening he is bored by the dismal village hotel and drives out to sleep in his new house. The path to the porch runs through wet blackberry vines. Just before he steps onto the veranda he hears a sound from the lake, like thick lips smacking or a soft body pulling itself out of mud. He puts it down to tides, though the sea is far away.
Inside, the air smells clean and faintly of cedar. Roger walks through every room by candlelight, makes a list of repairs, and falls asleep in the four-poster, wrapped in blankets. He feels welcomed and at home. The reader is meant to feel how ordinary the beginning is, so that what comes next is all the sharper.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about La cosa del lago
What is The Thing from the Lake about?
A New York composer buys a Connecticut farm and is visited at night by a mysterious woman who warns him of a monstrous presence at his window. He chooses to stay and fight, while love grows in the dark.
Who is Desire Michell in The Thing from the Lake?
She is the voice that speaks to Roger in the dark, a woman of old learning who shares a name with a witch from the family's past. Who she truly is unfolds as the story goes on.
Who wrote The Thing from the Lake and when?
Eleanor M. Ingram wrote it, and it is set in the years after the First World War. She died in 1921. It is a work of fiction, though it uses real older sources and literary allusions.
Is The Thing from the Lake easy to read?
Yes, in the sense that it is approachable. It has short chapters, a warm first-person narrator with a dry sense of humour, lively dialogue and a clear sequence of events that draws you from scene to scene.
What does the Barrier mean in The Thing from the Lake?
The Barrier is a vast gray wall that Roger sees in his night struggles, standing between humankind and dark forms of life. A gap in it lets the Thing reach him, and holding the gap is his task.