Fiction, Page 1, Ghost Stories, Ghosts, Ghost Books, Invisible Ink--Books on Ghosts & Hauntings

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Item #560

Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood, Jack Sullivan, 1978, biblio., index, 155 pp. $15.95

This elegantly written survey is by no means comprehensive, but may open some new doors for fans of the English ghost story. Sullivan devotes chapters to LeFanu's "Green Tea," which he regards as the archetypal ghost story (I disagree.), Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James; other "antiquarian" ghost-writers like Harley, Wakefield, de la Mare; and Algernon Blackwood.

Item #565

AMIS, Kingsley, The Green Man, 1969, 242 pp $12.00

Now that the video is out of print, we have to console ourselves with the book, which is back in print at last. Maurice, the genial innkeeper of The Green Man, has two obsessions: drink and women. While he likes to make up ghost stories to entertain his customers, he’s been seeing "hallucinations" of Dr Underhill, a 17^th century cleric who once lived on the site. Paired with a subplot about his seduction of his doctor’s wife, there is a studied ambiguity as to whether Maurice’s hallucinations are really ghostly visitations or just delirium tremens. In a Freudian showdown, Maurice is finally forced to confront the apparition of Dr Underhill. Amis uses subtle effects of sound and light and also gets in some sly digs at the post-Vatican II, hip Anglican clergy. Creepy and unsettlingly ambiguous.

Item #562

BIERCE, Ambrose, Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, Selected and Introduced by E.F. Bleiler, 1964, 199 pp. $6.95

Born in Ohio into a family of eccentrics whose behavior bordered on madness, and dubbed "Bitter Bierce" for his savage cynicism (his best-known work is The Devil's Dictionary); Bierce wrote some extremely disturbing ghost stories.

He once said, "To know that a man is dead should be enough." But for Bierce, it wasn't enough. Obsessive as a necrophiliac, he delved into the deepest graves of man's subconscious fears, tormenting his readers with psychic insecurity. His work revels in the violent, the shocking, and the perverse. In the end, Bierce left the world with a true mystery of his own. In 1914 he went to Mexico to follow Pancho Villa's army and vanished.

Item #559

BLACKWOOD, Algernon, Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, Selected with an Introduction by E.F. Bleiler, 1973, 366 pp., $8.95

The frontispiece of this collection shows Blackwood looking rather like the mummy of Rameses the Great. He is considered the greatest 20th century British writer of the supernatural. All I know is that his stories make me extremely nervous.

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