Category: Reading

Ghost Story by Peter Straub (1979)

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Ghost Story was a great success for Peter Straub when it was published in 1979, and it’s easy to see why. The novel has all kinds of unsettling stories within, enough to keep any reader up late at night. It’s written in the form of ghost stories told by four old men who suffer from terrible nightmares. Their stories from their own youth seem frighteningly believable and really captured my interest as I read. Since the men are elderly, we are reaching back in time many years, learning of strange happenings in rural upstate New York. I happen to live up here, and I felt Straub did a great job in that vein, carrying on the tradition of Washington Irving. The ghost tales become increasingly elaborate, with supernatural events in the present time overwhelming the characters.

I really enjoyed reading this book, which received high praise from Stephen King and others. (King would also collaborate with Straub on two different novels, The Talisman and Black House.) Straub wrote many successful novels and in addition to editing the Library of America’s Fantastic Tales set, which I’ve raved about a few times, he also edited their excellent H.P. Lovecraft volume. He was one of the greats of horror fiction, and this is a perfect starting point for his work.

The Refugee by Jane Rice (1943)

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Jane Rice wrote many science fiction and horror tales during the Golden Age of science fiction; The Refugee is one of them, first published in Unknown Worlds, a magazine edited by the legendary John Campbell, in October 1943.

Unknown Worlds, October 1943

This story has a real pulp feel to it—the heroine, Milli, is in some meager circumstances in wartime France, dreaming of better days, when a naked young man appears in her garden. She is intrigued by him, and befriends him when he reappears the next day, even after we learn that a mysterious and brutal murder of a neighbor has happened the night before. Sounds like a bad idea, but Milli is undeterred. The young man eyes her hungrily and Milli finds him quite appealing, leading to some sensual dialogue and imagery. Milli leads him inside and they have an encounter that is not what you might expect; the twist ending is comical and left me wanting to read more by Rice.

This is another one that I found in American Fantastic, the Library of America collection. Editor Peter Straub really outdid himself with this two volume set, it belongs in the library of every horror/fantasy reader. He brings together a real treasury of gothic tales, some quite well known, and others that deserve a wide audience.

The Phantom Coach, by Amelia Edwards (1864)

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In the grand tradition of Victorian Christmas ghost stories, Amelia Edward’s The Phantom Coach first appeared in The December, 1864 issue of Charles Dickens’ literary journal, All the Year Round. Amazingly, the preceding link is to that full issue (the cover image is below), which I intend to read. Much of the run of this journal is freely available online, thanks to the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive, and other sources.

The narrator of this tale of the damned is a man named Murray who is traveling across the Scottish moors when a snowstorm hits; afraid he won’t make it back home, he hails a passing stranger and asks for shelter. The man, Jacob, is the servant at a nearby house, but warns Murray that his master will not want him to stay. Jacob reluctantly allows Murray to follow him back to the residence.

The master of the house is at first irritated by Murray’s presence and tells him he has lived in this secluded place for twenty-three years, with no visitors at all for the past four. But the man is eager for news of the outside world—they have a fireside chat during which the old man tells him:

“The world grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief in apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon the minds of men so long and so firmly?”

The man further says that he himself believed in the supernatural, and as a man of science, his career was ruined for it. He speaks with eloquence about various philosophers and scientists, leaving Murray in awe at the breadth of his knowledge; Murray says that he “wandered from topic to topic, from speculation to speculation, like an inspired dreamer.”

When the storm ends, Murray wishes to make his way home, though it is late at night—it’s decided he’ll join the mail coach, which will be passing through a few miles away. Jacob leads him to the stop, and now the story gets macabre. He mentions that a mail coach had crashed over an embankment, killing all aboard, nine years before.

It’s at times like this in most ghost stories when I, and most readers, want to tell the protagonist to find some other way home. Of course, Murray doesn’t. He gets on the coach when it arrives, at first relieved to be out of the cold, until he realizes the awful truth of the matter.

This is a very fun, atmospheric horror tale, and I can see why it has been anthologized so often. You are set up beautifully by the desolate moor, the irritable servant, finally the old man telling tales of the supernatural in a parlor teeming with hundreds of books and scholarly apparatus of every conceivable kind. Incidentally, I want a room just like this, complete with a fireplace and ghost stories and a glass of sherry. If anyone out there reading this wants to help me achieve this, I’d be grateful.

 I came across my copy of this tale in a Dover thrift edition of ghost stories. I’ve loved those Dover editions since I was a young man—for just a few dollars you get some first-rate stories. My college instructors used to kindly assign these editions to their poor students, and I’ve kept with the tradition.  

Amelia Edwards was a woman of many talents: in addition to writing many novels and short stories, she was also a journalist, illustrator, and Egyptologist. Like most of the authors on this list, you can learn more about her life in her Dictionary of Literary Biography entry, though you will need a login to access it.

Ma’ame Pelagie by Kate Chopin (1894)

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“Ma’ame Pelagie,” they called her, though she was unmarried, as was her sister Pauline, a child in Ma’ame Pelagie’s eyes; a child of thirty-five.

Kate Chopin is well known for her novel The Awakening, but she was also a prolific writer of short stories, including this gem, Ma’ame Pelagie. Pelagie and her sister live in Louisiana in a three-room cabin beside their formerly grand ancestral home. For decades, we learn, they have lived this way, hoping to save enough to restore the mansion ‘shaped like the Pantheon,’ but now fallen into ruin. The sisters are visited by a niece who comes to live with them—her father, their brother, will soon be joining her. But the young girl cannot stand the sadness of the place and wants to leave.

“It was not the first time she had stolen away to the ruin at night-time, when the whole plantation slept; but she never before had been there with a heart so nearly broken. She was going there for the last time to dream her dreams; to see the visions that hitherto had crowded her days and nights, and to bid farewell to them.” Pelagie recalls these past grand days in a dreamlike reverie, the grand parties held there, and her lover, who went off to fight in ‘le guerre,’ as did so many others. And now we have the central problem on which this tale rests—the war, which eventually comes to the plantation. It is the tragedy of her life, to see her dreams ruined along with the grand house.

A year later, her brother Leandre builds a new, beautiful brick house where the old one stood. The house bustles with activity and music and the laughter of young people, the friends of ‘La Petite,’ her niece. However, Pelagie’s “soul had stayed in the shadow of the ruin.”

This is a great short gothic tale that works very well not only in the tragedy of these two women who live in the ruins of a once grand life, but also in the shadow of the civil war. The stain of slavery and the shadow of war haunts everything in this story of the south. The writing is quite elegant, as is much of the best writing of this period, and does much to transport us to these bygone days.

To learn more about Kate Chopin and her life, you can view this excellent PBS documentary on her.

Jeff Shaara in Poughkeepsie

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Yesterday my son and I were lucky to see Jeff Shaara, the historian and novelist, speak on his book Rise to Rebellion, the first of his two novels of the American Revolution. The books are terrific reads centered around some of the main players in the revolution, including Franklin, Adams, Washington, Jefferson, and others. Like his father, Michael, who wrote the Pulitzer winning classic The Killer Angels about Gettysburg (and which Jeff continued in two gripping books to complete a civil war trilogy), Jeff does a lot of research for his books and uses painstaking historical details to tell the story through the point of view of these characters. It truly makes history come alive in a way that general readers as well as history buffs will savor. My son, who is a well-read thirteen-year-old, loves Shaara’s books as well, and has read a number of them, including one on World War II and his most recent book on the Cuban missile crisis. Shaara also said that his newest book, due next May, is told from the point of view of Lincoln, starting in 1861 and ending in 1863; I’m sure my son and I will be picking up that one as well.

After a lively talk in which Shaara went over some of the details of these historical figures, there were some great questions from the audience about his writing process, and his thoughts on various historical events. He pointed out that while he understood why no one really writes much in popular fiction about someone like Robert E Lee anymore, he felt that it is a mistake to simply ignore or try to erase such historical figures. In a book like Gods and Generals, he showed Lee as the flawed man he was, and Shaara does a great service with work like this. It’s unhelpful to simply view Lee as an evil traitor, or on the other hand, as a noble son of the South. Instead, Shaara paints a picture of an imperfect man who, while acting gallantly in the eyes of the south, committed treason in the eyes of the North. He certainly made some choices that led down a destructive path, for a cause that was indeed evil. Yet it helps to put these actions in the context of the events through which Lee lived, to better understand what happened. But these days, most of us in this country don’t want nuance.

Shaara was also asked his opinion of the current state of the United States, since this event was part of the celebrations that are taking place as part of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He said what many in the auditorium were feeling, that we are in a very dark time, and that he feared what the future may hold.

If you enjoy history, or even if you don’t, you ought to read some of his books. You can start anywhere, but since we’re at that 250th anniversary, I’d suggest starting with Rise to Rebellion and the Boston massacre. It’s a great book, and a timely way to learn some things about our history that you may not know. It may even inspire you to do some things to help make sure this republic of ours survives through these perilous times for more anniversaries.

Thanks to the Poughkeepsie Public library for hosting this event. This was our second time seeing Mr. Shaara—he is usually at Gettysburg on every anniversary of the battle, and we saw him there last year on a family trip.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (1953)

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“You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”

One of the most anthologized and well-regarded short stories of the last century, A Good Man is Hard to Find, like some of the other stories on this list, deserves its towering reputation. O’Connor was a master of the short story, and this tale is one of the most shocking gothic stories I’ve ever read. I can still recall the palpable dread I felt as I first read it many years ago in a college class on the short story.

This tale involves a family that is out for a drive when unspeakable violence occurs, but there is plenty of foreshadowing, with the grandmother mentioning the ‘loss of values’ in the modern world; she also points out a graveyard filled with slaves from a bygone era. She remembers that there was a plantation in the area, and convinces her son, Bailey, to take a turn onto a deserted road, where the family has a sudden accident, flipping their car, and are met by the “Misfit,” a terrifying killer.

This tale is suffused with the south, and with notions of God and the possibilities of salvation and grace. The grandmother attempts to placate the Misfit, who clearly means the family harm, saying he is one of her ‘babies,’ and touches his shoulder. But there’s no salvation here for anyone, it seems.

I think it is best to read something like this, with such a well-known reputation, with an open mind. It’s better not to seek out or think too much about any of the criticism of it at first, just read it. It will probably leave you feeling desolate, as some of the very best horror stories tend to do.

Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and thirty-one short stories and is considered one of the great American writers of the 20th century. Sadly, she was ill with Lupus and died at just 39. Who knows what she may have achieved had she lived longer; as it is, she left behind an amazing legacy.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

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“I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.”

This story has been analyzed in myriad ways and is considered an important work of feminist literature. It’s a chronicle of a mental breakdown; a woman is suffering from ‘a slight hysterical tendency’ according to her physician husband, following the birth of her child. She spends the story confined to an upstairs room at a country estate and comes to believe that a woman is trapped behind the yellow wallpaper in the room.

On reading the story, you end up infuriated by the woman’s husband, and sympathetic toward her plight, but the way Gilman describes her experience through a series of journal entries also makes the story quite memorable. Her slow descent into madness is told with convincing, disturbing detail.

Gilman suffered from postpartum depression, so this story has been read with this in mind. At the time, a ‘rest cure’ was administered for treatment, which only made things worse for her, so she stopped the treatment and resumed writing, later saying that she feared a mental breakdown had she continued to follow the doctor’s cure. Gilman instead followed the advice of a female doctor, Mary Putnam Jacobi, who argued against such rest. Much has been written about Gilman and her pioneering story, for those interested, your local library will have plenty of information about her life.

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James (1898)

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“The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance–all strewn with crumpled playbills.”

The Turn of the Screw is one of the most influential, classic horror tales ever written; everyone ought to read it. It’s a gothic story of a haunting at a British country estate, and the reader is never sure whether the ghosts are real or imagined. The story is told through a frame of a man reading a manuscript of a governess who believes that the children in her charge are being haunted by the ghosts of two former employees of the estate.

I find that the presence of children in fiction will usually increase the tension, and in a well written story like this one, you feel quite concerned for the children, worried that they are either being haunted, or being cared for by someone who is unstable and not up to the task. Either way, the sadness of these children, who are seemingly ignored by their parents, is something I couldn’t shake when I read this story. It was such a disturbing tale because of everything left to the reader’s imagination. In my opinion, this is usually the way to scare the reader far more than the usual genre tropes.

James was as prolific and famous as an author can be, and his reputation rests on a number of well known works, including Daisy Miller, Wings of the Dove, Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl, to name just a few. But it is Turn of the Screw that I always think of first, and I think this is likely true of other readers. It has been adapted no less than twenty-eight times, with numerous film versions, an opera by Benjamin Britten, various stage adaptations, and new adaptations still being made today. There’s something about this unsettling story that has deeply resonated with readers for more than a century.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

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‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.’

The first ever horror and science fiction novel, first published in 1818, when Mary Shelley was just twenty years old, Frankenstein has a reputation that has been as long lasting as it is deserved. A beautifully written tale that began as a legendary writing contest between Shelley, her husband Percy, Byron, Dr. John Polidori, and others who were spending a summer together in Geneva, Frankenstein bears little resemblance to the monster most of us recognize from the many film adaptations that we’ve seen through the decades.

The monster is philosophical and brilliant, almost superhuman, and the real villains are those in the story who judge him by his ghastly appearance. There are as many interpretations of the work as there are film adaptations: a warning against humans playing God, the irresponsible Victor whose thirst for knowledge leads to catastrophe, the humans who judge the creature by how hideous he is. Several chapters in the book deal with a family of poor, blind people who treat Frankenstein with care and respect because they cannot see him. It’s written in a beautifully poetic style, was immediately successful, and still finds new and enthusiastic readers today.

There are a few different versions of the book, which Shelley revised in 1831, but most scholars prefer the earlier edition. Shelley had a very difficult early life, losing her famous mother when she was just a few weeks old. Her father, also a well-known intellectual, remarried a woman with whom Mary had a very difficult relationship. Under these circumstances it seems a miracle she was able to write such a classic. Her husband, the famous Romantic poet, also caused a scandal when he left his wife for Mary, and had numerous affairs.

I could write a lengthy essay about this book and its influence and various interpretations, but I’m by no means an expert on her; countless scholars have already done that better than I could, and the purpose of my blog this month is to offer a few thoughts on some of my favorite horror novels. This is an essential one that everyone ought to read. It’s one of the great novels in literary history, a book that will help you understand where the genre came from.

Fevre Dream by George RR Martin (1982)

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George RR Martin is known for his groundbreaking fantasy novels, but back in 1982 he wrote this gem of a vampire book, about a down on his luck steamship captain, Abner Marsh, who makes a bargain with an odd man, Joshua York: he gets to have his dream ship, financed completely by the mysterious stranger, but he must transport the man, his friends, and their cargo, no questions asked. As you might imagine, this arrangement does not go as planned. It’s a fun read with plenty of adventure and scares. If you enjoyed the Song of Ice and Fire novels, I think you’ll love this book. There are some interesting characters, weird plot twists, great writing, and of course, vampires.

According to Martin, his book sales around this time were poor, and contributed to his decision to become a TV writer. For years afterward, he worked on things like The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast, until he wrote A Game of Thrones in 1996, which marked his return to novels. I’ve enjoyed everything he wrote. Armageddon Rag is another excellent read, this one about a cursed rock band. His short stories, science fiction novels, and Wild Cards series are also worth checking out. I only hope we get Winds of Winter sometime soon.