Peter Haining's "Mammoth" selection of modern ghost stories has a section entitled "The Ghost Feelers : Modern Gothic Tales". In his Foreword, Haining writes :
" The Gothic Story also returned re-vitalised to address new generations, thanks to the work of an excellent school of female writers, loosely categorised as "Ghost Feelers". At the forefront was the American Edith Wharton, who claimed it was a conscious act rather than a belief to write about the supernatural. "I don't believe in ghosts", she said, "but I'm afraid of them". Even with this reservation, Wharton and others went ahead to create the "new gothic" of claustrophobia, disintegration and terror of the soul, notably Marie Belloc Lowndes, Eudora Welty, Daphne Du Maurier and Jane Gardam".
Of Haining's selection of women writers, it is Daphne Du Maurier who is perhaps the most interesting. As he notes, Du Maurier "has been credited with shifting the Gothic Mode towards romantic fiction" again in her novel "Rebecca" (1938). Her short stories "The Birds" (1952) and "Don't Look Now" (1966) were also both, in Haining's words, "brilliantly filmed". Du Maurier's story of "The Pool" (1959) in this selection is a tale which finely blends modern psychological insights with sometimes dark and otherworldy visions, which draw the reader in as strongly as they do the character of the young woman who beholds them.
