Among the most versatile of all living novelists, Mr. Mittelholzer, after his controversially experimental novel "Latticed Echoes", now gives us a study in the macabre in the manner of his earlier ghost story "My Bones and My Flute". But "Eltonsbrody" is not a ghost story. It is an attempt to paint in words a picture of an old house and of the landscape immediately surrounding it. Every house has a spirit of its own, and old houses especially seem to possess an atmosphere expressive of the people who have inhabited them and of the dramas that have been enacted in them throughout the years. Some houses leave more "exciting" impressions than others - wield a more strange and oppressive influence, and such a house is Eltonsbrody in the hilly north-eastern corner of the island of Barbados. A young English painter, Woodsley, on holiday in the island, is invited by the charming old lady who owns and occupies Eltonsbrody to spend a few days in her home. He settles down to paint a study of the house in its setting of casuarina and mahogany trees, only to discover that he is in the midst of odd happenings - happenings as odd as his hostess and her servants. The house lives up to his early impression of it, producing not only strange and blood-curdling events but yielding up eventually some grisly relics.
Author
Edgar Mittelholzer is considered the first West Indian novelist, i.e. even though there were writers who wrote about Caribbean themes before him, he was the first to make a successful professional life out of it. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) of Afro-European heritage, he began writing in 1929 and self-published his first book, Creole Chips, in 1937. Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad in 1941, eventually migrating to England in 1948, living the rest of his life there except for three years in Barbados, and a shorter period in Canada. Between 1951 and 1965, he published twenty-one novels, and two works of non-fiction, including his autobiographical, A Swarthy Boy. "Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. In addition, eight of Mittelholzer's novels are non-Caribbean in subject and setting. For all these reasons he deserves the title of "father" of the novel in the English-speaking Caribbean" - Encyclopedia of World Biography. Among Edgar Mittelholzer's many honours was to have been the first West Indian to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing (1952). He died by his own hand in 1965, a suicide by fire predicted in several of his novels. Excerpts from: Peepal Tree Press http://www.peepaltreepress.com/ Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook by Daryl Cumber Dance.
