Twice Lost

This eccentric social drama from English writer Paul, who died in 1973, was first published in 1960. McNally Editions editor Jeremy Davies writes in a foreword that Paul’s books received a “pulpy” treatment the first time around and argues that her Jamesian prose deserves more serious appreciation. The story follows the unexplained disappearance of seven-year-old Vivian Lambert in a small English town. She was last seen on the grounds of Carlotta House, a Regency-style villa in Hilberry Village recently purchased by Thomas Antequin, an aging writer who recently found fame. Thirteen years later, after Thomas has died, a woman who claims to be the grown-up Vivian unexpectedly appears, to the dismay of those who have a vested interest in her remaining gone, among them her widowed stepmother, who’s convinced that Vivian will demand her share of her father’s estate. Paul animates her characters with striking qualities, but she keeps the more dramatic moments—marriages and deaths—offstage, often addressing them only in passing. Still, the writing is razor-sharp (“He was a normal, or even a slightly sub-normal person—with genius added, genius extraneous, as it were, to his own personality,” Thomas’s son says of his father). Paul sustains a delightfully macabre mood in this worthy artifact. (Oct.)