Ghost stories for Christmas
I remember threads from years ago in which we celebrated various ghost/horror writers, but at this season of the fireside ghost story in the darkened room, I wondered what are Shipmates' favourite stories? I'm going to suggest we can each name three stories. Novels if you like, thought personally I think ghost stories are more usually suited to short story form.
I'm quite "trad" in my choices. For me, no-one can quite touch the quality of those two English Edwardians, M.R.James and E.F.Benson. But first, I must mention Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw - one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read. It's no real spoiler to say that one of the features of this story is the question of whether there are ghosts, or whether the key events are all due to a main character's mental illness. When I first read it 30 years ago, I decided it was ghosts. When I read it again last year, it was mental illness - and all the more disturbing for it.
My Benson choice is one that has genuinely nasty elements, including some really horrible murders, in the set-up, but which works out with old-fashioned English charm and a happy ending - How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery. It's a lovely New Year's Eve story.
I think my favourite M.R.James story is Canon Alberic's Scrapbook. James is master of the slow, creepy set-up, and when at the beginning of this story Mr Dennistoun begins to hear strange noises in the little cathedral, you know you're in for a James classic.
I'm quite "trad" in my choices. For me, no-one can quite touch the quality of those two English Edwardians, M.R.James and E.F.Benson. But first, I must mention Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw - one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read. It's no real spoiler to say that one of the features of this story is the question of whether there are ghosts, or whether the key events are all due to a main character's mental illness. When I first read it 30 years ago, I decided it was ghosts. When I read it again last year, it was mental illness - and all the more disturbing for it.
My Benson choice is one that has genuinely nasty elements, including some really horrible murders, in the set-up, but which works out with old-fashioned English charm and a happy ending - How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery. It's a lovely New Year's Eve story.
I think my favourite M.R.James story is Canon Alberic's Scrapbook. James is master of the slow, creepy set-up, and when at the beginning of this story Mr Dennistoun begins to hear strange noises in the little cathedral, you know you're in for a James classic.
Comments
M.R. James gets my vote as one of the best practitioners of the genre. "Oh, whistle..."
Shirley Jackson's witchy The Haunting of Hill House comes to mind. More horror than haunting, perhaps. Her short story The Lottery is a special kind of chilling, and I've found her We Have Always Lived in the Castle unforgettable.
He's not well-known but I find the creepy haunted fiction of Robert Aickmann unsettling in many ways. I came across his work via Tartarus Press and while he doesn't do conventional ghost stories at all (his work was a major influence for David Lynch), The Stains is one of his eeriest short fictions.
The story that frightened me the most, though, has to be The Trains, 1951, in which two hikers get lost in a bleak deserted valley and try to study a map, pinning it down with stones to prevent it from blowing away. Each time they move on, getting more lost, the narrator tells us they leave behind them “four grey stones at the corners of nothing”. The hikers reach an isolated house near a railway -- and, of course, it is not exactly a sanctuary. As with MR James, the unsaid and barely implied is the scariest part of Aickmann's fiction.
@MaryLouise, Aickman is a very recent discovery of mine - so far I’ve only read about half of the stories in the collection Dark Entries, and he’s very good, though, as you say, some of them aren’t at all conventional ghost stories. Shirley Jackson’s work is delicious, but again quite disturbing - there’s a neurotic edge to it, or at least to some of her characters.
@Rossweisse, Oh Whistle... is near perfect. (Two-bedded hotel rooms seem to have bugged E.F.Benson, too - his story The Other Bed is rather good.)
I’ll check out some of the other short stories mentioned.
But a recent post on one of my favorite political blogs -- The Reality-Based Community -- was very timely after reading this thread.
Keith Humphreys often recommends a film for the weekend. This week it was a BBC adaption of M. R. James's Whistle and I'll Come To You, which apparently kicked off the BBC series of Christmas ghost stories. Humphreys makes it sound like a great watch. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to try to catch it tomorrow.
Is that the one starring Michael Hordern, and directed by Jonathan Miller? I think it's very good indeed. There was another version made in (I think) 2005 with John Hurt, but it departed significantly from James's story. Because of that, I didn't like it, but I think if you weren't comparing it to the original, it's a good tv ghost story.
The Hordern film (which I think is only about 40 minutes) did indeed kick off the BBC Christmas ghost story tradition. One of them was a very good adaptation of Dickens's The Signalman, with Denholm Elliott.