The Laughing Mill, and Other Stories

A pearl-shell necklace. A ghostly mill. A sailor's daughter who may not be entirely of this world. The opening tale casts us onto a stormy coast where Jack Poyntz, a weathered old mariner, holds court in his farmhouse with sea stories, dark rum, and salt in the air. His daughter Agatha wears a strange necklace, pale as bone, and the narrator recognizes it from childhood whispers, a family heirloom long thought lost to the sea. Locals speak of the Devil's Ribs, a treacherous reef that claims ships, and the Laughing Mill, a spectral structure tied to drownings and old sins. What begins as coastal romance deepens into something far more unsettling: secrets surfacing like bodies from the deep, and the supernatural bleeding through the wallpaper of everyday life. Hawthorne writes with late-Victorian gothic flair about inheritance, not of money but of guilt, and what we owe to the dead. For readers who crave M.R. James's maritime uncanny or the damp, rotting elegance of Henry James's Turn of the Screw.