Ghosts & Hauntings
Ghost stories and haunted houses, Dickens's Christmas visitors and M. R. James's antiquaries among them.
- Shorter than you'd expect, and funnier too; Scrooge starts out genuinely nasty, not cartoonish, which makes his slow thaw actually land. You can read it in one December evening, and the scene at the Cratchits' table will still get you, even knowing how it ends.
- You never find out whether the governess is seeing ghosts or losing her mind, and James makes that uncertainty itch for days after. The prose winds around itself, so save it for a patient evening, ideally one where a figure at the window would unsettle you.
- These are ghost stories told by a man who loved old libraries, and the horror creeps in through footnotes and cathedral archives before something with a face of crumpled linen sits up in the spare bed. Best read one at a time, at night, when the house is quiet.
- You get a wonderfully odd Gothic mystery, with the cold, watchful Countess Narona at its center and a London hotel haunted by Lord Montbarry’s death in Venice. It’s melodramatic and occasionally strange, but the creeping rooms, hidden motives, and Collins’s relish for sensation make it easy to settle into.
- Ghost stories that work by dread rather than shock; in Green Tea a clergyman is followed by a small black monkey only he can see, and it ruins him by degrees. Victorian pacing, real chill; best at night, one at a time.
- Benson likes to lull you with golf weekends and pleasant country houses before something goes very wrong, and the slow slide is the fun of it. Read The Room in the Tower or Caterpillars alone at night and you'll see; they're quiet stories that stick.
- Fair warning, this one moves at the pace of dust settling, but poor proud Hepzibah nerving herself to open a penny shop in her cursed old family house is oddly touching, and Hawthorne's gloomy humor sneaks up on you. Best read slow, on autumn evenings.
Here for 'The Canterville Ghost,' in which an American family buys an English manor and declines to be frightened by the ghost that comes with it.
- Gothic for people who like their ghosts polite: Edmund spends a night in the haunted east wing of Castle Lovel, doors groan, dreams hint, and virtue gets tidily rewarded. If you want terror, look elsewhere; if you want a cozy, orderly haunting, this is it.
- You get a wonderfully eerie, inward kind of horror here: Arthur Lawford wakes from an afternoon sleep with the face of a dead man, and watches ordinary domestic life become quietly unbearable. It moves slowly and strangely, more interested in loneliness and identity than shocks, so you’ll like it if unease that seeps in gradually is your thing.