New Ghosts in Old Wrappers

I've been hunting ghost stories for more than a month now, looking for the materials for a series of Saturday readings we plan for the bookstore in October, and I've grown a little weary of haunting. My fatigue comes not so much from all that I've read to date, as from the knowledge of all the stories I still might read and haven't. Even limiting myself to just those short stories written in English by English or American authors in the last century or so, I've come to appreciate just how impossible it would be to read even only what might be called the best of the dead. The ghost story, or more broadly the horror story or the supernatural or suspense story, would seem to be the one kind of story that for more than one hundred years nearly every writer, major or minor, wrote, and wrote well enough in many, many instances to be numbered among the best and anthologized in one collection or another. It would seemingly at this point be easier just to list the few writers who never wrote, by even the widest definition, a scary story.

I honestly had no idea.

I loved monsters as a child. I watched classic horror films, read DC Horror Comics, and made glow-in-the-dark models of The Phantom of the Opera, The Wolfman, Frankenstein's Monster. I read anthologies of ghost and horror stories gathered from the pages of the Alfred Hitchcock magazine. I can still remember the Edward Gorey cover on the first book of classic ghost stories that I bought. (In a way then, starting my collecting of Edward Gorey, though I didn't know it at the time.) My parents, while they found all of this rather morbid and unhealthy, did not stop me from pursuing my fascination with the grotesque. They simply suggested, now and again, that they liked the pictures I drew of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx better than the pictures I drew of Lon Chaney as the Hunchback of Notre Dame because, well, Chaplin seemed nicer. (Groucho my mother always remembered as being somehow a little dirty minded, but she was reluctant to draw my attention to this at the time, in the hope that that sort of thing was still going over my head. It was I suppose, though not for much longer. Imagine a world in which Groucho Marx posed the slightest threat to a boy's character and you will have some idea of just how remote my childhood must now seem.)

Every boy, in whatever age, must have some experience of monsters, even if it's only in a story told around a campfire. Being frightened and surviving the experience is a necessary part of surviving childhood. And an appreciation of the tragedy of monsters suggests, to my way of thinking, a wider sympathy than not in the young. I don't know that there's any more lasting harm in a ghost story, or a horror movie, than there is in being read The Old Testament, which after all has to be among the most consistently terrifying and bloody minded collection of supernatural tales ever told.

By the time I had moved on to actually reading the originals of Dracula and Frankenstein, I had grown out of most of my earlier monsters, and ghosts and ghost stories I eventually put away as nursery entertainments, only coming back to these when I became devoted to Henry James and read The Turn of the Screw and discovered just how much a master could make of a haunted house. Ever since I've read the ghost stories I've read not for the ghosts so much as for the writing.

Now, however, I find myself hunting up ghosts old and new, not with the idea of frightening the kiddies so much as of giving a grown up audience a bit of a shiver. As a result, I've been concentrating on only those books and stories that seem likeliest to yield a more subtle disquiet, something more suggestive of mortality than immortality.


And so I've turned not only to contemporary sources, like the anthologies we sell and The Library of America volumes I bought just this year, but to every old book of ghost stories and the like I could find. I've even caused some Algernon Blackwood to be reprinted on the store's Espresso Book Machine. Just this past week I came across not one but two such old numbers, both from wartime Britain, on a lunchtime stop in at my favorite neighborhood used book shop. In the first of these, edited by no less than Dorothy L. Sayers, I've yet to browse much. The same old Saki story, "The Open Window," seems to have been selected not just for these two but for every anthology almost from the day the damned thing was written. It isn't a bad story -- Saki didn't write any -- but it isn't actually much but funny, and so serves my purpose not at all. (I did luckily manage to find elsewhere the Saki story I most wanted to read, and at least two others, so the first of of Saturday readings will indeed be an evening with Saki.) And in the other book, from Faber, I've only just come across "The Apple Tree," by Elizabeth Bowen. It's one of the few true ghost stories by an early Modern that I found to have all the requisite supernatural elements but with a central conceit so unlike any other story I've read that I really hope it might make it into our final list. I do think it would need a woman to read it aloud to have it's full effect, but that may yet be something that happens.

But whatever I find in these two recent acquisitions, I must admit that adding them to my stack of stories yet to be read has rather tipped the balance, if just for the night. I just don't know that I can read another ghost. Still, they are rather wonderful looking old things, these two new/old books, aren't they? If ever there were books that looked likely to yield up something to haunt this last hour before bed...

And so I suppose I'm going to take my monsters with me to bed again. Never too old, or too tired, for a good ghost story.