The Country Of The Blind And Other Stories: H.G. Wells

[poliphilo]

"The Country of the Blind" is Wells's best short story- a beautifully balanced fable about the individual and society.  The rest  are a liquorice all-sorts of Wellsian themes: there are comic sketches, horror stories, a ghost story, SF stories, social satires- and one very odd little story, "The Valley of the Spiders", which could almost have been written by Borges. The second-best story is "The Door in the Wall", which- simple and relatively undeveloped as it is- goes to the heart of what it was that made Wells tick. Had Wells visited that enchanted garden himself? Probably not, but he knew it was there- and that knowledge drove everything he did in art as in life.