The Watcher by the Threshold

By John Buchan

The Watcher by the Threshold was written in the year 1900 by John Buchan. This book is one of the most popular novels of John Buchan, and has been translated into several other languages around the world.

This book is published by Booklassic which brings young readers closer to classic literature globally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Booklassic
• Release date: Jul 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9789635221226

John Buchan

Author of the iconic novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan filled many roles including barrister, colonial administrator, publisher, Director of Intelligence, and Member of Parliament. The Thirty-Nine Steps, first in the Richard Hannay series, is widely regarded as the starting point for espionage fiction and was written to pass time while Buchan recovered from an illness. During the outbreak of the First World War, Buchan wrote propaganda for the British war effort, combining his skills as author and politician. In 1935 Buchan was appointed the 15th Governor General of Canada and established the Governor General’s Literacy Award. Buchan was enthusiastic about literacy and the evolution of Canadian culture. He died in 1940 and received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.

Reviews for The Watcher by the Threshold

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A collection of tales about Scotland, some eerie, some nicely mythological, and some just plain moralistic. I quite enjoyed "No-Man's Land," if only for its incredibly stereotypical treatment of its subject, and "The Watcher By the Threshold" is a nicely creepy story of possession with a somewhat disappointing ending. Buchan tries to be a little too moralistic with his endings overall, I think; evil is too often vanquished for his stories to be properly horrifying.

[myopicbookworm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

From the dedication: "It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories". Of the five stories in this volume, the first four fall broadly into the category of supernatural fiction. No-Man's-Land sees the traveller venturing into a bleak Scottish wilderness in which, according to folk rumour, something sinister lurks behind tales of the Brownies. In The Far Islands a vision of a pathway into the west haunts a man from his childhood on the Scottish coast through public school and rowing at Oxford to the battlefield. The Watcher by the Threshold is a tale in the classic mode of possession by an evil spirit, with the amusing involvement of the stolid local minister, Mr Oliphant. The Outgoing of the Tide tells of a wicked witch who seeks to corrupt her daughter. The last tale, Fountainblue, stands out oddly, being more or less a straight tale of romantic rivalry and adventure on the rocky coastline of Scotland. The whole collection is very much a period piece from the late Victorian world of the Boer War. The Scots vocabulary of the rural characters is unsurprising enough, but the main narrative also contains a fair sprinkling of partly comprehensible expressions such as "forwandered" or "dreeing his weird".MB 5-vii-2013