The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.
Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (1973)
Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” is rightly among the most highly regarded of English-language ghost stories, with a title that’s perfect for the story in several ways. The rest of the stories in this collection are quite effective too. “The Lady Maid’s Bell,” “The Eyes,” “The Triumph of Night, and “The Pomegranate Seeds” are among my favorites. Wharton (1862-1937) has style, restraint and much more political consciousness than many Americans, writers or otherwise, of her era and elite background. A very enjoyable read!
Oliver Onions, Widdershins (first published 1911; Dover Books edition 1978)
One thing that distinguishes the ghost stories of Oliver Onions (1873-1961) from others in the classic British ghost story is their air of urban bohemian decadence in a tradition that has often been placed in the rural and the remote. Onions shares with writers like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen an interest in the mystical, the magical, and the pagan, but unlike them he creates a kind of stylish urban decay, exploring the world of strange artists and those who have fallen or are falling outside the conventional British social order. There’s more than a hint of Huysmans, if you know the work of that famous French decadent.
Today, Widdershins is Onions most well-known book, and it starts with one of the most rightly famous stories in the British ghost story tradition, “The Beckoning Fair One,” a slow burn of dark and dangerous enchantment set in a growing urban wasteland. The mood it creates makes it one of the best ghost stories ever. His later collections are worth reading too. He also wrote novels and stories without ghosts dealing with problems of magic, psychology, and even using detective elements, which were equally well known as his ghost stories in the decades of his greatest fame but which are never mentioned by anyone any more, at least not that I know of.
Richard Matheson, A Stir of Echoes (1958)
Not his best novel (that’s I Am Legend, followed closely by The Incredible Shrinking Man) but A Stir of Echoes is still quite an enjoyable ghost novel, not the least of whose horrors is the claustrophobic life of 1950s Southern California suburbanites. The novel was also made into a 1999 movie starring Kevin Bacon that’s well worth watching although it moves the setting of the story to urban Chicago. Matheson (1926-2013) is the source of many great movie scripts (both as a fiction writer and screenwriter), some of which are among the best movies of their kind.
F. Marion Crawford, ghost stories (many different editions; mine is called For The Blood Is The Life)
For nearly 20 years, from the late 1880s until the early 1900s, F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909) might well have been the best-selling of all American fiction writers. No kidding. It’s a pretty long run. He wrote historical novels of many kinds, most notably on the subject of Italian crime families and stories set in what Americans often then called “Arabia.” These books have been out of print for many decades, although the digital environment has recently brought them back, though I can’t say I’ve done much more than glance at them. Their emphasis on non-English-language criminal societies likely suggests something about their cultural perspective. They were combinations of romance action adventure and relatively flimsy realism and were often willing to incorporate magic and fantasy. Crawford also wrote plays, some of which became movies late in his life and after his death. I often use Crawford as an example in my classes of the strange fate of many writers immensely popular in their times, but who within not that many decades become almost completely unknown. Of course, none of my students have ever heard of him.
Crawford could tell a high energy story and was quite an entertaining writer. His eight ghost stories are the work of his most read today and are very much worth reading, probably because they’re so enjoyable and don’t focus on dated portrayals of supposedly exotic environments. “The Open Berth” is probably his most famous story, and it sure is good, and the others are similarly fun and sometimes genuinely haunting. The same eight stories published in the collection I have from the 1990s have been republished in numerous editions. If Crawford is remembered today mostly because of these eight stories, that’s not the worst fate a writer might meet.
César Aria, Ghosts (2009)
This book by Argentinian writer César Aira gets lumped in often with South American magical realism, and I suppose it meets at least the technical definition. To me though it seems more like straight realism, although a bit dreamlike, that also happens to have ghosts in a major role. The narrative is about the relationship between infrastructure (buildings under construction) and people and reads at times nearly like an allegory in service of political critique, except that it’s more subtle than such a description would suggest. It’s not a horror novel really, although there are quite a few odd and chilling moments that make it a good read both for more adventurous genre fans and for those who don’t reject serious fiction just because it has ghosts in it. I think it’s fair to call Ghosts a successful example of slipstream work.
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