Well, I’m glad I took this little side trip in reading these stories of both another genre and of another era.
It is rather surprising that language changes with the times, and reminds me of photographs of a certain time period where try as you might, you cannot imagine these people existing in the present, even given updated clothes and hairdos.
"Why yes, I have been quite gay while you were asleep. Three men from outside. Englishmen. It is a pity you missed them." (The Man Who Liked Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, p. 314)
One obviously does soon become comfortable with the style, but it is sometimes difficult to jerk oneself out of this world and into that of the present, let’s say, as given by Cormac McCarthy. But I think there’s more than the mere difference of seventy years gone by, and the genre of horror–although some might consider McCarthy’s stories as horrific as any written.
And so, though not for that reason alone, I’m anxious to get right back to him.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology