[In Another Part of the Wood] Ms Bainbridge uses a conventional device—a group holiday in deepest countryside—to collect a grotesque menagerie of creepies in one location, the better to focus, distil and refine their awfulness….

With such a nest of vipers, hemmed in suffocatingly by seasonal rain, how could a novelist go wrong? Actually, it needs a delicate touch to avoid overkill in such scenarios, and Ms Bainbridge possesses just the right amount of restraint. She recounts the inexorable regress of the holiday, the churning of the sexual tensions, the neglect of the two children by adults preoccupied with their own miserable versions of existential angst, and the hideous tragedy which ensues, with a deftness that is wholly admirable.

John Naughton, "Creepies" (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1979; reprinted by permission of John Naughton), in The Listener, Vol. 102, No. 2641, December 13, 1979, p. 825.