Review-ish: Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories

I’m fitfully trying to cull my books. I don't have time to make a proper job of it, but waiting until spring seemed too long.

So far I’ve made a pile of about fifteen, including an almost unreadably faded copy of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov with this excellent pulpy cover:

As I have not read it, I do not know what character Doris Day is playing in this image.

I had plucked Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories to send away as well, but then I thought perhaps I should actually read it. The trouble with culling.

I believe I bought this book mostly in order to share a Moment with the bearded and bearish bookseller.

These are not, as one might hope, ghost stories written by Roald Dahl, but stories he anthologized. Dahl himself wrote only the peculiar introduction, which begins by describing his anthologizing process, including a long and irritating dissertation about gender and genre (women, he opines, are good at ghost stories, novels, and children's stories, and bad at all other genres of short story and at plays); veers off into children’s literature; and ends up talking about a failed television pilot.

Dahl also makes the perplexing claim that "the best ghost stories don't have any ghosts in them." This is an interesting idea in itself, but not supported by his own evidence, since all of the stories he's selected, except one, have highly palpable ghosts.

Still, many of the book's stories are by giants of the ghostly age, so that was promising.

As you know, older ghost stories can be disappointing because their mechanics are now so well-established that it’s hard to surprise, alarm, or usefully distract even a casual reader.

I am extremely susceptible to being creeped the f* out. On the whole, these stories did not do that -- or not in themselves. Some, I notice, have implanted images that are creepier than their delivery systems. Maybe this is the real haunting they accomplish: not so much to scare me in the moment, as to seed ghosts in my mind.

And perhaps looking to be scared is the wrong way to approach these stories. They may have quite other goals. Certainly they are written for a different set of expectations. I'm not a great consumer of horror film (see above under creeped the f* out), but still, my expectations are constructed by the media of my own era.

These ghost stories are more about regret than terror. The ghosts are transparently (excuse me) the ghosts of past misdeeds and wrongs, often rather mundane ones, which is sort of interesting: our own everyday hauntings rather than horrific tragedies.

( A few not-very-spoilery thoughts )

I liked the ideas behind “In the Tube” and “Afterwards” best – “In the Tube” works with non-linear time and fixed destiny, but also responsibility for other people; “Afterwards” has that delicious idea of encountering a ghost that you don’t know is a ghost until long afterwards. I liked “Playmates” in a more sentimental vein.

So if I were to put “something is coming”, “what’s wrong with this picture”, non-linear time, and the ghost you don’t know is a ghost together, with a bit of Aickman’s stomach-churning deep mythology and a little sentiment, I’d have my perfect Hallowe’en story.

Meanwhile, my own books continue to haunt me with past selves, old ambitions, former loves, and fruitless arguments with absent judges.

{rf}