Is a synopsis even necessary? A friend of the family (a retired soldier) comes by to tell stories about his travels and ends up discussing the eponymous fetish. The father ends up buying it, even though the soldier thinks it should be destroyed.
The father wishes for some money; nothing happens. The son goes off to work, and later that day a visitor comes by to tell them their son died in an accident at work. And though the company declaims all responsibility, they do offer compensation. In the exact amount the father had wished for. There's a funeral, and days pass, and eventually the mother insists the father wish for their son to come back to life. He does, and for a while it seems like nothings going to happen, but then there's a knock on the door. The mother goes to answer it, but the father has a foreboding of what will be on the other side and makes his final wish. When the mother opens the door only a terrible moaning is on the other side.
The biggest difference between the story as written and how it usually gets portrayed is the timing of events. The son doesn't go off to work until the next day and the mother doesn't even think of wishing him back until several days after the funeral. The story has a very British feel, unsurprising since the author was British. One thing I did learn from the introduction was that in his lifetime he was most famous as a humorist writing stories about the sea and sailors.
The atmosphere in the story is spot on. Which is very important since it's a short story that doesn't have gore or anything of the sort, the atmosphere is what has to do the work.
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