This little project arose from Sarah Waters's list of the ten best ghost stories. Some I'd already read. Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills, for example (my 1999 diary records my appreciation of this "strange book", which "doesn't wrap anything up, doesn't explain anything, but leaves you with your speculations, suspicions, and conjectures", and I concluded at the time that it's "a subtle, haunting novel"). Carmilla is deservedly on the list, as are The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, and Beloved.


Probably a different Hill House...

But there were five others. One of those will need a post to itself. But four are short stories, which I've lumped together here.

It would be unfair to reveal the plots, as the joy of reading this kind of story is its element of suspense. But here are some quick reactions:

1.
The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W.W Jacobs (1863-1943)

Sergeant-Major Morris, a "visitor from distant parts", calls on the White family (father, mother, and son) at Laburnum Villa. He shows them a talisman (the monkey's paw of the title) that has been magically imbued with the ability to grant three separate people three separate wishes. Morris knows from experience that the thing has "worked" twice, and there's one set of wishes left. But he also knows that there's a dark mischief attached to it, and so he attempts to throw it on the fire. Mr White intervenes, rescues it, and insists on having his wish. Which is for two hundred pounds...

And two hundred pounds do indeed come his way, but it turns out that they have been dearly bought. With the second wish, Mrs White tries to undo the harm caused by the first. And it seems she's successful. But again it's a case of failing to realize the implications of the wish, which are borne in on Mr White when he hears someone knocking at the door... He uses the last wish to countermand his wife's.

The story closes like this: "The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road."

There's a menacing quality to this tale that works very well. I defy you to read it without a shiver...

For more, turn the pages for yourself... You can also read a summary and a bit of an analysis.

My foray into W.W. Jacobs -- who seems a sadly neglected writer, despite his popularity with contemporaries -- threw up loads of other things that look worth reading. Watch this space...


The collection the story first appeared in

***

2.
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

This is fascinating. Ostensibly, it's a first-person account of a descent into something that resembles madness. Our narrator regards herself as ill; her husband (a doctor) says she isn't ill, but is suffering from "temporary nervous depression"; her brother (also a doctor) agrees with him... So the scene is set for a bit of misogynistic bullying... In an attempt to aid her recovery, her husband (John) prescribes fresh air and moderate exercise, but forbids her to socialize and to "work", ie, write: "He hates to have me write a word." So she's writing this account in secret, hiding it away when she hears anyone coming.

As she spends a lot of time in her room (formerly the nursery, and equipped with barred windows and a heavy, nailed-down bedstead), she becomes increasingly aware of the wallpaper: "I never saw a worse paper in my life... It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others." The pattern lends itself to weird interpretations, and she describes it fantastically: "Looked at in one way, each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes -- a kind of 'debased Romanesque' with delirium tremens -- go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity." She feels she sees things in the paper that no-one else can. In particular she sees a shape which is "like a woman stooping down and creeping about" behind the outer pattern.

Her developing illness builds a fine sense of claustrophobia in the reader: She finds herself unable to think straight; she's tired, but can't sleep; she's becoming afraid of John.

And the woman she perceives in the wallpaper seems to be trapped too: "The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out." That outside pattern, she decides, definitely depicts bars... And the woman is trying to climb through them... What is more, she comes to understand, the woman sometimes manages to get out. So, the narrator decides to help her a bit... More and more she starts to identify with the woman in the wallpaper...

But in what sense is this a "ghost story"? Well, the narrator definitely intuits something uncanny: The house is "a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house... There is something strange about the house -- I can feel it."

And Waters insists: "The room in which its unnamed protagonist slowly loses her wits is definitely a 'haunted' one: the ghosts are other women, trying furiously but fruitlessly to 'shake the bars' of the claustrophobic patterns in which they are trapped."

Ghosts or no, this story seems a terrible indictment of the kind of treatment meted out to women with "hysterical tendencies". As Kate Jones reminds us, it was Virginia Woolf's fear of such treatment that fed through into her depiction of Septimus Warren Smith and his violent rejection of a rest-cure in the country. Jones, however, gives the story a psychological, rather than ghost-inflected, interpretation.

Gilman is an interesting character in her own right. She herself suffered a nervous breakdown (probably connected with postnatal depression), and -- like her protagonist -- was prescribed a rest cure. She championed economic independence for women (yay!), but also eugenicist ideas, with all their racist and ableist connotations (not so yay...). Halle Butler goes further into these difficulties.

Meanwhile, The Yellow Wallpaper has inspired different interpretations: "Critics disagree over the meaning of the story, variously arguing the significance of everything from linguistic cues, to psychoanalytic interpretations, to historiographical readings. While some critics have hailed the narrator as a feminist heroine, others have seen in her a maternal failure coupled with a morbid fear of female sexuality. Some have viewed the story, with its yellow paper, as an exemplar of the silencing of women writers in 19th-century America; others have focused on its gothic elements."

Any which way, it's a good read...


The author

***

3.
The Demon Lover (1945) by Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

Bowen also wrote The Last September, and she certainly does dwellings really well... Here, as Waters points out, she "beautifully captures the eerie atmosphere of wartime London, with its blitzed, abandoned houses".

This is another claustrophobic story. Kathleen Drover, who has moved with her family to the country to escape the London bombardments, returns to her town house to gather up some stuff. Everything is familiar -- and yet strange.

Then she finds a letter on the table. She thought the caretaker was away, and even if he were back, would he just leave a letter on the table? "She felt intruded upon -- and by someone contemptuous of her ways."

The letter has that day's date, and it purports to be from a young man she knew during the First World War. It tells her to expect him "at the hour arranged". In August 1916, she became engaged to someone who was about to head back to France, and who seemed somehow sinister. Some months later, he is reported missing, presumed killed. Eventually, she marries someone else.

So who has written this letter? And what is he planning to do? I'll say no more, but this is one creepy, shivery, terrifying story...



Again, there are several possible interpretations. Is it a ghost story? Or a realistic account of a stalker? Or a psychological story expressing a figment of Kathleen's imagination (she is stressed by the war, after all, and was ill after the birth of her third child)?

There is more on these rival understandings in this article by Terry W. Thompson, who adds two other possibilities: Robert Calder's suggestion that this is an allegory, "with Kathleen Drover -- isolated, aging, and vulnerable -- representing an ally-less Britain in the early days of World War Two", and war itself showing itself as the true demon; and his own contention that actually this is a doppelganger story, with the figure of Kathleen pitting "the impetuous teenager who loved a charismatic bad boy versus the proper English matron in a pink wool jumper who married for security a man she did not love".

Take your pick. Bowen is not going to spell it out for you...

***

4.
The Specialist's Hat (1998) by Kelly Link

In this story we meet identical twins, Samantha and Claire, aged 10. Their mother is dead, and they're spending the summer with their father in a huge house called Eight Chimneys. And we meet the babysitter. It's hard to tell how old she is; no-one can ever remember her name; and she's teaching them what it's like to be dead...

"'This house is haunted,' Claire says.
"'I know it is,' the babysitter says. 'I used to live here.'"

The twins' father, who doesn't fulfil his paternal duties very assiduously, is writing a history of the house, and of Charles Cheatham Rash, a poet who used to live there in the early years of the 20th century. The Specialist's Hat is the title of a poem supposedly written by Rash, which the girls' father says is actually an incantation used on a whaleboat to conjure up a whale.

Link recreates the atmosphere of the creepy old house very powerfully: "It isn't as dark in the attic as they had imagined. The oaks that block the light and make the first three stories so dim and green and mysterious during the day, don't reach all the way up. Extravagant moonlight, dusty and pale, streams in the angled dormer windows... The ceiling slopes down, impaled upon the eight thick-waisted chimney stacks. The chimneys seem too alive, somehow, to be contained in this empty, neglected place; they thrust almost angrily through the roof and attic floor. In the moonlight, they look like they're breathing."


"Eight Chimneys has exactly 100 windows, all still with the original wavery panes of hand-blown glass..."

The children are grief-stricken and susceptible. Since their mother's death, they've been playing "the Dead game", whose most important rule is this: "When you are Dead, you don't have to be afraid of anything."

I'm not going to relate the end of the story, partly because I don't want to introduce spoilers, and partly because I'm really not sure exactly what happens at the close... If we had multiple possible interpretations for the Bowen and Gilman stories, there are exponentially more for this one. This blogger lists some of the ambivalent points, and comments: "Choose your own interpretative adventure on each of these points of uncertainty, and get a slightly different story. Therefore this story contains well over 500 possible stories. Yes, I calculated that, in a vain attempt to impose comprehensible human analysis on the incomprehensible..."

The fact that we're left uncertain is a major part of the point of this story... Indeed, Helen Marshall offers a brilliant analysis, which she prefaces like this: "Most readers would agree the story is fundamentally disquieting; but few, I think, could agree on why."

***

To sum up, the best ghost stories work by building atmosphere, and then letting the reader's imagination do all the heavy lifting... Clever...