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Phyllis Paul published eleven novels between 1933 and 1967, but otherwise left almost no trace of herself. She was unmarried, lived quietly, and was intensely private. She died in 1973, at the age of 70, after being hit by a motorcycle. If not for a label on her pocket handkerchief, her body would have remained unidentified. Jeremy M. Davies is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
"""Paul's great subject, on the page and off, was darkness--darkness both mundane and metaphysical. To survive, her characters cling to the dark, as much to hide their sins as to keep the truth at a safe distance.""--Jeremy M. Davies ""from the Foreword"" ""[Paul writes with] an almost medieval sense of good and ill. One enters a different world--compelling, fearful, mysterious. The characters live, the place has frightening reality . . . a kind of violent beauty.""--Elizabeth Jane Howard ""Twice Lost gains strength from its surprisingly artful blend of literary fiction and mystery . . . The effect reminds me of the way Elena Ferrante moves between genres in the Neapolitan quartet, allowing herself almost anything in the quest to unsettle and seduce the comfortable reader. But it is also emotionally precise, and infernally effective. In Twice Lost, feelings proliferate, genres cross, and the plot thickens all at once. The effect is contrapuntal in the best way.""--Joanna Biggs ""Harper's"" ""Alternating the knotty revelations of a whodunnit with subjective dives into the uncanny spell of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and vivid depictions of the pastoral English countryside, Paul's narrative leads readers down the garden path only to send them backtracking through a hedge maze of competing interpretations, under the gradually darkening sky of a fallen Eden . . . Paul [is] a writer worthy of comparison with such diverse sensibilities as Patricia Highsmith's mordant psychological suspense and Charles Williams's Manichean metaphysical fantasy. An odd duck with iridescent plumage.""--David Wright ""Library Journal"" ""Paul animates her characters with striking qualities . . . The writing is razor-sharp . . . Paul sustains a delightfully macabre mood.""-- ""Publishers Weekly"" ""Beautifully executed, deeply unsettling, [Twice Lost] is enigmatic and ambiguous in the way of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock . . . Its first chapter immediately creates, then intensifies, an unnerving atmosphere of mystery and menace . . . Astonishing.""--Michael Dirda ""Washington Post"" ""Haunting, fascinating, wonderful.""-- ""San Francisco Chronicle"" ""Miss Paul writes with an icicle, in a fine and distinguished way that is quite her own . . . the effect is sombre, impressive, moving.""-- ""Times Literary Supplement"" ""Phyllis Paul is a writer of hints and half-lights. Her suburban scene is shadowy with empty roads and tall trees in the dusk. Twice Lost is not an easy book to read but neither is it an easy book to forget.""-- ""Times Literary Supplement"" ""Phyllis Paul was that rare creature, a puritan with a passionate and colourful imagination . . . [Her] quintessential novel, and arguably her finest, is Twice Lost (1961). Here she is writing at the height of her powers, combining even more successfully than elsewhere a mystery story with a metaphysical fable . . . Twice Lost is an unforgettable portrayal of the human capacity for self-deception, and of the vulnerability of the innocent to the inroads of scrupulosity. It is a novel of a uniquely unsettling kind, the definitive achievement of the possessor of such a fascinating . . . and disturbing gift.""--Glen Cavaliero ""Wormwood"""
