“House Taken Over” is the bare skeleton of a haunted house story, every scrap of irrelevant detail flensed away. Like Ballard’s “Garden of Time” it’s a tale of class struggle & the terrifying rise of the proletariat as seen by the comfortable rich. Like Camus’s “La Peste”, it’s a fable about the insidious approach of fascism and the plight of millions of war refugees. But most of all it’s completely and terrifyingly uncanny, sharing DNA with Borges and Lovecraft, with Kafka’s “The Burrow”, with “The Balcony” of Jean Genet, Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”, Freud’s 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche", the Diary of Anne Frank, Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”, the wartime torch-song “My Sister and I (We Don’t Talk About That)”, Richard Mattheson’s inversion of the very concept of monstrosity in “I Am Legend”, Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant examination of climate derangement, various Gothic horrors, and the plight of the passive, childlike Eloi in H G Wells’ “Time Machine”, weakened by generations of absolute ease and destined to be devoured by the bestial cannibalistic Morlocks.

“I spent my childhood in a haze of goblins and elves”, wrote the great Argentinean fabulist Julio Cortázar, “For me, the fantastic was perfectly natural; I had no doubts at all about it. That’s just the way things were.” Championed by Jorge Luis Borges, persecuted by the dictator dictator Juan Peron, Cortazar fled to Paris and became an international youth-culture icon. His stories were made into films by Godard & Antonioni, and Pablo Neruda said of him, in his heyday, "Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences…”