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radiantfracture) wrote2018-10-27 09:48 am
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.
- L.P. Hartley’s “W.S.” is a writer’s nightmare, similar to some Stephen King tales you may have encountered. Its best bit is its “something is coming but is not here yet” structure, which always wigs me out, but the story itself -- meh;
- Rosemary Timperley’s “Harry” left me with a vivid impression of white roses;
- “The Corner Shop” (Cynthia Asquith) is melancholy rather than frightening (but I do love a junk shop story, and also stories that do the thing with time that this one does);
- “In the Tube” (E.F. Benson) is unsettling in its dislocation of time, and develops a standard fireside-tale scene rather well;
- “Christmas Meeting” is sweet and literary, but seems to rush to its conclusion – I would read a whole melancholy novella on this theme (Rosemary Timperly);
- “Elias and the Draug” is a grim and grisly folk-tale (Jonas Lie);
- “Playmates” is a creepier Secret Garden that made me tear up unexpectedly at the end (A.M. Burrage);
- “Ringing the Changes” is genuinely ghastly and a bit pagan (Aickman);
- “The Telephone” presented a similar relationship to the previous story (older husband, younger wife), with haunted technology – it was a bit sentimental, and reminded me of Agatha Christie’s lesser stories (Mary Treadgold);
- “The Ghost of a Hand” (LeFanu) presents a profoundly creepy idea in a neutral case-study sort of voice – unpleasant more than frightening, using the mechanism of distaste rather than the special effects of horror;
- “The Sweeper” is unpleasantly fixated on distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor; it presents a somewhat confused morality. I do like the “there’s something missing from this scene” element;
- Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” has a great central concept – a ghost that everyone knows about but no one can really describe, and that you don’t know is a ghost until long after you’ve seen it – but the execution didn’t frighten me, and the mechanics of the haunting seemed awkward to manage – again, I thought of Agatha Christie;
- “On the Brighton Road” is a sort of morality tale, rather medieval though set in the modern era (Richard Middleton); and
- “The Upper Berth” (Marion Crawford) is a sea-haunting that I think suffers in lacking this ethical component of haunting the others evoke – alarming things happen, but they lack intimate resonance.
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}
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It's a sales tool -- they worry about accuracy only to the extent they worry about sales of the next book to the readers of this one.
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[The doorbell] had been the weakest, the puniest of noises. It had been no more than is a fledgling's first attempt at a twitter. But I was not judging it by its volume. Deafening peals from steeples had meant less to me than that one single note breaking the silence—in there. In there, in the dark, the bell that had answered me was still quivering, I supposed, on its wire. But there was no one to answer it, no footstep to come hither from those recesses, making prints in the dust. Well, I could answer it; and again my hand closed on the knob, unhesitatingly this time, pulling further. That was my answer; and the rejoinder to it was more than I had thought to hear—a whole quick sequence of notes, faint but clear, playful, yet poignantly sad, like a trill of laughter echoing out of the past, or even merely out of this neighbouring darkness. It was so like something I had known, so recognisable and oh, recognising, that I was lost in wonder.
And long must I have remained standing at that door, for I heard the sound often, often. I must have rung again and again, tenaciously, vehemently, in my folly.
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And WILLIAM SHATNER IS IN IT
Check it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov_(1958_film)