Mrs. Midnight

A TV reality show host helps to restore an East End music hall and uncovers the dreadful secret of Mrs Midnight and her Animal Comedians...A historian travels to Switzerland to ghost the autobiography of an exiled Balkan king and encounters a sinister cult...The Master of an Oxford college tries to introduce a dubious piece of modern sculpture into his college chapel with dire consequences...A strange meeting takes place on a playing field between an officer on leave from the trenches and his former headmaster...The settings and characters in Reggie Oliver's fifth collection of 'strange' stories are as varied and unusual as ever, though, as in previous volumes, the theatre forms the milieu of a number of his tales. But the theatres are not just English ones, in the provinces and the West End: one is on the Black Sea; another in post-colonial Kenya. Themes are equally varied, but underlying all is a deep sense of the spiritual under-currents just below the surface of everyday existence, and the precariousness of 'normality'.