The Inexplicable Mystery

The last ghost, to follow Eliot, has "gently" gone from the bookstore, and with it, our first experiment in inviting some new blood to read aloud at the bookstore. We've organized similar events before; inviting students to read Blake with me for his birthday, opening poetry readings to participation from the audience, but never anything quite like our October schedule before. This was a bit of a departure, and our most sustained undertaking to date: five events over the course of a month, eight different readers, a dozen stories by ten different writers.
I read or reread dozens of ghost stories in preparation, thinking I would have suggestions to make, should anyone reading need them. Don't know that anything I read with this in mind was used. Neither Wharton nor Shirley Jackson ended up on the bill, for instance. Turned out, most of those we recruited already had something in mind to read, or found something on their own. A couple of our readers found stories in books that I'd recommended, books I owned, in fact, though none of the stories read from these books did I even know! That was a surprise, and a pleasant one.

Of the stories we eventually heard, perhaps half had any supernatural element at all, which was another surprise. My own selection from Saki included one that was and one that wasn't otherworldly, though no less chilling, I thought, for that. This series was, after all, intended for grown-ups, and so murder, or even just the threat of it, proved to shiver us with at least the frequency with which any ghost might. Two of the most successful readings, by our own Kiki Hood, who nowadays works out in the Bellevue bookstore, and Seattle Central Library's own David Wright, both featured stories in which the mayhem, potential and actual, came from an all too likely, and human, source.

David read a story from Ray Bradbury, "The Town Where No One Got Off," which turned out to start on a train, have nothing really to do with sexual repression, and proved to be wonderfully disturbing none the less. Bradbury, for me, was a memory of childhood. I was never a great fan, but I did read quite a bit when I was a kid. David's reading sent me to the massive new collection from Everyman's Library, where I read more. While I avoided anything too familiar, or obviously set off this planet, I was delighted to read story after story that might be worthy of any collection of Creepy Tales. (As I've probably already said here before, that was the most personally satisfying and unexpected development to come from this undertaking, finding and reading books I otherwise would not have.)

Kiki read a justly famous story that has seen more than one adaptation to television and film, "Lamb to the Slaughter." I'd forgotten, if I ever knew, who wrote it until she described it to me one afternoon on the phone. Roald Dahl. Kiki read it wonderfully, with just the right piquancy to make the thing digestible, so to say. Dahl was another of those writers it would never have occurred to me to suggest. Again, what I knew of him, I knew from long ago. There are two common narratives of Mr. Dahl, likely to be familiar to those of us who hadn't actually read much of him. The first, for anyone old enough to remember, comes from a television movie based on the life of his wife and called, as I remember it, The Patricia Neal Story, in which the writer proved himself a loyal and resolute husband when his wife had a disabling stroke giving birth to their fifth child. Resolute Roald, in this movie, minds the kids, teaches the wife to walk and talk again, and all ends happily. (The couple divorced a few years later, but nonetheless an admirable and inspiring story.) The other impression of Dahl is of a benignant, if rather tart, Father Goose, a kind of English L. Frank Baum. The problem there being that even if one had only read Dahl's most famous children's book, as an adult, one would be left with the inescapable impression that Willy Wonka, for all his magical charm, is, at heart, a bit of a sociopath. Roald Dahl, as it turns out, was actually a man of a rather chilly English reserve, and as a writer, of a really rather murderous imagination. He likewise has had the honor of a collected stories done up by Everyman's Library, and it's nearly as weighty as Bradbury's. Reading in this book, I was reminded how bitterly misunderstood quite good writers can be when what they've done for children subsumes whatever reputation they might otherwise have had. Read Dahl's novel, My Uncle Oswald as a result, and found it very funny, in a nasty way. Most satisfying.

Beyond the authors rediscovered or heard for the first time, for me, what will linger from our October readings will be the sound of so many voices, some familiar, some not, all raised just to entertain one another, in not many others, in a bookstore. These readings asked for and got little or no support from the admirable folks who usually promote events. This project originated and was all but wholly produced among booksellers. We drew participants from more than one department and location, and one very special reader, as I've said, from the library, but this project was ours, rather than something more usually coming from a call to or from a publisher, or linked to something already on a local schedule, or to any purpose other than entertaining ourselves and such of our customers and friends who found us. Doing something independent of the usual expectations of touring authors and the promotion of new books was a risk, and it had it's limitations as a result, but on the whole, I think it was well worth doing, and something like will be worth doing again.

We didn't need the excuse of Halloween, really. The ghosts we conjured were welcome, but not necessary, as some of our selections proved. All that is required to do this sort of thing successfully is story, and enthusiasm. What then have we proved? Just that we might, that people will listen, that our stories matter to us, whatever our age, that books should be shared, that there is no experience comparable to being in the company of the like-minded, that every voice might find the story that suits it best. As Johnson said of ghosts, so I would say of reading aloud, "All argument is against it; but all belief is for it."