With my head still buried in tales by M P Shiel, I find myself wondering if our author was haunted by the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather like that wonderful game Cheese or Font?, one could ask, of certain short passages, Shiel or Hopkins?

Consider the emboldened patch of this sentence, from the apocalyptically bonkers Shiel story Vaila:

“As he lifted a latch the metal flew inward with instant impetuosity and swung him far, while a blast of the storm, braying and booming through the aperture with buccal and reboant bravura, caught and pinned me against an angle of the wall.”