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.
E.F. Benson, The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson (1992)
E.F. Benson was a prolific and successful writer and not just of ghost stories. He is maybe most well known now for his series of Mapp and Lucia novels, a comedy of manners set in a seaside town and that has been made into two British TV series, but his ghost stories too continue to be widely known and read. He’s a key writer in bringing the British ghost story into the 20th century, with his haunted tales set in a variety of believable environments, country and town and city, and with a wide range of ordinary people among his cast of characters. His 1906 story “The Bus Conductor,” whose key elements were borrowed by the famous British multi-episode horror movie Dead of Night (1944), is just one example of the kinds of ordinary daily life contexts in his ghost stories.
Benson’s style is sort of a streamlined Victorian that, like his subject matter, also rides the line between the 19th and 20th centuries. And if neither his style or his stories have the incredible precision of M.R. James, Benson can still tell a ghost story with some nicely chilling twists. His stories also seem to me a key link between the classic British ghost tale and what became modern British horror fiction. I imagine, for instance, that what was once a new generation of British horror with a basis in realism, established by Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die (1979), might have been significantly influenced by these crisply told tales.
J.S. LeFanu, Best Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu (1964)
And now, my personal favorite. The ghost and related horror tales of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814-73) are historically just early enough that they neither conform to or create a standard for ghost fiction except to the extent that these highly original tales remain some of the highpoints of all supernatural literature. LeFanu is not as inventive as Poe, but his tales can be very psychologically acute and disturbing, and he can be quite effective in his characterizations (and of women as well as men).
Like some other collections in the Dover series of supernatural writing, the work in these two books is by no means all ghost stories. LeFanu covers a big range of supernatural concepts and unique perspectives like those in “Carmilla” and “Green Tea,” stories which are either too obvious to need mentioning or else you need to go out and read them right away if supernatural fiction appeals to you. A story like “The Haunted Baronet” contains complexities of psychology and symbol that make it a ghost tale like no other written before or since. It has no predecessors, and no imitators though it anticipates some elements of surrealism and of Robert Aickman’s even later concept of the “strange story.”
Le Fanu’s more conventionally ghost-oriented tales have a clear basis in the folk stories of the Irish. His work is filled with a powerful sense of time and location and how to distort it. In his stories, the past is dangerous, the present is just as bad, and people are complex and often unforgettably horrible. The woods and the fields hide stories that his characters realize too late that they never wanted to find out about. Along with mystery and the unexpected, there’s loss and tragedy of a vividness that the ghost stories of the British isles rarely otherwise reach.
“Schalken the Painter,” half ghost story and half something more terrifying, and among the greatest of the stories collected here, was years ago made into a British TV movie that’s well worth seeing. The movie’s sense of dread and precision of detail is heightened by the relatively minimal amount of dialogue.
Paul Gallico, Too Many Ghosts (1959)
Well, writing this series has been fun for me, and darkness on All Hallow’s Eve is nearly upon us. I thought I’d end this series for this haunted season with a ghost farce by Paul Gallico. You can call Too Many Ghosts a cozy horror comedy, with all the classic features of the British ghost story gathered together: a mansion that may or not may be haunted, a cast of characters with conflicting and conflicted goals, and all the moving furniture and turning doorknobs and seances and poltergeist experiences you could want. It’s like the ghost novel that Agatha Christie never wrote, although Gallico’s style takes a bit of getting used to it at first.
The novel is a mystery too. I’m not going to give anything away, but if you want a funhouse of light-hearted affects and plenty of chances to skewer the British aristocracy without really doing them any harm, plus, who knows, maybe even a love story, then this novel and all the many many ghosts in it is about as much silly fun as any ghost book I can think of.
No comments:
Post a Comment