The Door in the Wall

By H. G. Wells

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fantastica
• Release date: Feb 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787241893

H. G. Wells

H.G. Wells is considered by many to be the father of science fiction. He was the author of numerous classics such as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and many more. 

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H. G. Wells

The Door in the Wall

Fantastica

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New Edition

Published by Fantastica

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This Edition first published in 2017

Copyright © 2017 Fantastica

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ISBN: 9781787241893

Contents

THE DOOR IN THE WALL

THE DOOR IN THE WALL

I

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. He was mystifying! I said, and then: How well he did it!. . . . . It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.

Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey—I hardly know which word to use—experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don’t resort

Reviews for The Door in the Wall

[nebula21-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An uninspiring collection of short stories. I was disappointed with this book after reading The War of the Worlds, which is brilliant. The stories were not very interesting and fell short somehow. The storytelling was somewhat lacking. H.G. Wells is not a master of the short story!There appears to different versions of this book. My copy contained the following stories:The Door in the WallThe StarA Dream of ArmageddonThe ConeA Moonlight FableThe Diamond MakerThe Lord of the DynamosThe Country of the Blind

[currerbell-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Includes "The Country of the Blind." There is little science fiction per se in this collection, and aside from "The Country of the Blind" the stories as a whole are a bit mediocre, though "The Door in the Wall" and "A Midnight Fable" do have an air of fantasy and whimsicality to them and "The Star" is a fairly interesting "end of the world" disaster story.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reason for Reading: I enjoy the author.This is a small book, about the size of a man's hand and contains three short stories. 2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Penguin Modern Classics list and in honour of this event they have published 50 of these "Mini Modern" books to celebrate the great short story writers. The books are all uniform.I like H.G. Wells; I've read all his fiction, some of the novels more than once. I especially like his science fiction, the classics "The Time Machine" and "The Invisible Man". I read his short stories when I was a kid in a humongous old tome entitled "The Complete Works of H.G. Wells", though it's completeness was referring to his fiction, so I must have come across these stories at least once before though they were not familiar to me at this reading. The three stories are very different from each other. The first is mostly humorous with a trick ending, the second is what we expect when we hear the name H.G. Wells: science fiction and the third is more a horror story in the vein on Poe. None of the stories were particularly impressive to me. They were all OK, with the sci-fi one standing out amongst the three but I'm sure someone could have picked three more outstanding stories to represent this great writer. Overall, just OK.The Door in the Wall - The titular story in this collection and the longest is about a man who recounts the story of an old school chum who came to visit him in the night who tells him the tale of how he has been haunted his entire life by a mysterious door in the wall, which he entered once, and the narrator tells us how this story ends tragically. 3/5The Sea Raiders - A day when the Devonshire coast is attacked by strange aggressive man-eating tentacled sea creatures. My favourite of the collection. 4/5The Moth - A man is either being haunted by his late academic rival or his death has driven him insane. 3/5