I've always loved a good spooky story with plenty of spine-chilling moments, but I haven’t really
got the stomach for gore and graphic violence. Subtle hints are often so much
more terrifying to me than having things spelt out in detail, which is probably
why the Stephen King style of horror has never been my cup of tea. I want to be
creeped out, but I think the most skilful writers will use the power of
suggestion to lead you along gently, and let your own twisted imagination fill
in the gaps. Check out the short stories and collections below if, like me, you
prefer old-fashioned ghost stories, macabre twists, and psychological suspense. Then, let us know which of your favourite spooky stories you would recommend, over at The Brown Brontë's Book Club
Collected Ghost
Stories, M. R. James
In the best tradition of the English ghost story, these
feature urbane, scholarly protagonists – usually Oxbridge academics or experts
who acquire a suspicious artefact of some kind - who are far too sensible and
sceptical to be taken in by old wives’ tales and superstitions. But of course,
they then witness “things” that can’t be explained: things that crawl, things
that flap, things that shuffle, things that move when they shouldn’t. A white
shape at a window, a mysterious figure in a picture, a sound behind a door –
not particularly scary on the surface, perhaps. But in the language he uses,
James subverts the conventions of the gothic ghost story: it’s what he doesn’t say that makes these indistinct
impressions all the more terrifying. The language is understated and
matter-of-fact, to the point that you might find yourself asking why the
protagonists aren’t freaking out more than they are - but it’s the strategically placed details
which provide the shudders.
Carmilla, Green
Tea and Other Horrors, Sheridan Le Fanu
AKA The Daddy of the Victorian gothic short story, Le Fanu’s
ghost stories were admired by, and influenced, writers such as Henry James, R.
L. Stevenson and of course, M. R. James, who called him “absolutely in the first
rank as a writer of ghost stories.” Le Fanu’s tales sit more within the gothic
horror tradition, with haunted houses and supernatural beings galore, if that’s
the kind of thing you like, but it’s easy to see where other writers have taken
inspiration from his style and techniques. “The Ghost Of A Hand” is the kind of
story that would have terrified the living daylight out of me as a child. “The
Child That Went With The Fairies” is a more bittersweet tale inspired by Celtic
folklore, while “The Familiar” contains many of the elements of suggestion and
suspense that influenced the writing of the authors mentioned above. Don’t read
them while you’re alone, if you get frightened by things that go bump in the
night!
Horror Stories, E.
Nesbit
Most of us will have fond memories of “The Railway Children”
and “Five Children and It”, but I didn’t know that Nesbit had also written
short stories for adults. The stories in this collection follow some of the
generic conventions that I’ve mentioned above, but instead of the scholarly,
scientific, male protagonists we find in the stories of M. R. James and Le
Fanu, Nesbit gives us tales framed by both male and female narrators, and her
stories are more obviously concerned with the self-destructive nature of
thwarted love, jealousy and infatuation. It’s particularly interesting to read
these stories in the light of the knowledge that Nesbit was married to an
unfaithful husband, who had an affair with her best friend. It’s not hard to see
that they contain expressions of her own anger and frustrations, perhaps with a
dose of wish fulfilment. This is complemented by Nesbit’s adoption of the male
voice, which is often typically (for the period) patronising towards the female
protagonists, infantilising them with diminutive words like “little” and
“child”. I wonder if these male personae are also supposed to be a dig at the
constraints she must have felt, trapped in a loveless marriage in a patriarchal
society which gave little recourse to women in that position.
Dark Tales,
Shirley Jackson
These stories are aptly named, as Jackson takes darkness to
a wholly different level. When her short story The Lottery was published in The
New Yorker in 1948, it unsettled readers so much that it elicited hate mail and
cancelled subscriptions. Unlike the collections above, this set of stories does
not deal with the supernatural so much as it does the psychology of ordinary
people carrying out disturbing acts of manipulation or intimidation. The first
story is reminiscent of the opening of Jackson’s novel “We Have Always Lived In
The Castle”, with seemingly ordinary – even pleasant - settings and characters
– and a pervading sense of unease that something is not quite right. The rest
of the stories work similarly. Being master of the slow reveal, she keeps the
reader unsettled by dropping details throughout that don’t quite fit: a look
here, a word there, a thought or memory that’s not fully explained, and often
leaves you at the end wondering, “did that mean what I thought it meant?” The
juxtaposition between the mundane settings and the twisted thought processes of
her characters brilliantly heightens that sense of unease – I was thoroughly
disturbed.
Kiss Kiss, Roald
Dahl
Roald Dahl’s children’s stories are full of nasty characters
who meet gruesome ends. Who can forget The Twits, or the horrible granny in
George’s Marvellous Medicine? Dahl’s dark imagination is often tempered with
his sharp sense of humour, and this combination is brilliantly illustrated in
his short stories for adults. Like Jackson’s Dark Tales, Dahl isn’t concerned
with traditional ghosts and ghouls. He’s far more concerned with the murky
workings of people’s minds, and the stories in “Kiss Kiss” delve right into
this, zooming in on the little frustrations and petty annoyances that might
drive people to do unspeakable things. The most conventionally “horror”-like
story is “Royal Jelly” – a tale of an ambitious beekeeper who resorts to an
unusual treatment for his sick baby, with grotesque results. Equally unsettling
perhaps, are the stories of unlikely characters carrying out unpleasant acts to
shocking conclusions, such as “The Landlady” or “Lamb To The Slaughter”. These stories will have you looking sideways
at everyone you meet, wondering what horrors are lurking beneath the surface. But
because many of the stories are so funny, you don’t have to worry about not
being able to sleep afterwards.
The Skeleton,
Rabindranath Tagore
This isn’t a collection, but it is a little tale that has
all the ingredients of the collections above: sceptical, academic male
protagonist; brush with the supernatural; frustrated emotions, and a terrible
step taken in the name of thwarted love. I found it interesting that it seemed
to follow many of the conventions of the English ghost story, although it was
written in Bangla. The male interlocutor – a medical student - is spending the
night in an unfamiliar college room, when he’s disturbed by a disembodied
female voice by his bed. The voice tells him that she is looking for her
skeleton, which used to hang in the room, and was used by medical students like
himself, to learn anatomy. The ghost then proceeds to tell the student, grumpy
and annoyed at being disturbed from his sleep, the story of her life, love, and
untimely death. The aim of this story isn’t so much to spook the reader, as
there are too many cynical asides from the interlocutor for us to fully immerse
ourselves in the experience. However there is a macabre thread woven through
it, relating not only to the “romance” but the social mores of the day. You
might need some contextual knowledge on the position of women, specifically
widows, in traditional Hindu society. If you’re familiar with Tagore’s opinions
on the subject, this is in keeping with his other writing on the topic but in
an entirely different genre: a social critique disguised as a ghost story. You
can find a translation of the original Bangla story here.
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