Walpole wrote horror novels that tended more towards the psychological rather than supernatural, with a brooding underlying mysticism. Hans Frost begins: No one perhaps in the United Kingdom was quite so frightened as was Nathalie Swan on the third day of November, 1924, sitting in a third-class carriage about quarter to five of a cold, windy darkening afternoon. Her train was drawing her into Paddington Station, and how she wished that she were dead!