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The Transformation of E F Benson
My lunchtime reading of late has been The Horror Horn, a collection of ghost stories by E F Benson, published in 1974 by Panther, with a typically excellent cover by Bruce Pennington. In the 70s,...
View ArticleMe & Horror: My first horror story
I wrote my first horror story before I read any. When I was about 10 or 11, my English teacher gave us a lesson on M R James. He told us the plot of “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You”, and followed...
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Oliver Onions’ Ghost Stories
I first came across Oliver Onions through his most famous ghost story, “The Beckoning Fair One”, in a book called 4 Classic Ghostly Tales. A story of artistic obsession, it’s about a writer, Oleron,...
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An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman
‘Is there an opposite of haunted?’ asks Steven Naremore, after he and his family move into the Hollow, an isolated, quirky house in the West Country. They’ve been noticing strange things happening, but...
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Dark Matter by Michelle Paver
Something I learned from Michelle Paver’s Arctic ghost story, Dark Matter, is that the word ‘haunted’ derives from the Old Norse ‘heimta’, meaning ‘to bring home’, and the Old English ‘hamettan’, ‘to...
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The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The first time I read The Turn of the Screw, I hated it. I hated the over-stuffy prose, which seemed to be hiding a good ghost story behind thickets of Victorian verbiage so tangled the only emotion to...
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Mary Rose by J M Barrie
Mary Rose is, literally, a sinister play: right-handed J M Barrie, suffering writer’s cramp, wrote it with his left hand. It is, in a way, the anti-Peter Pan, dealing not with the wonderful adventures...
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Three Types of Ghost Story
I’ve been reading a few ghost stories lately. Most recently Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (having already seen Nigel Kneale’s 1989 TV film, and the recent Hammer version), though I found it wanting...
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Night Visitors by Julia Briggs
Night Visitors, Julia Briggs’s 1977 study of ‘The rise and fall of the English ghost story’, employs a bit of (potentially fatal) boundary-blurring early on, first as regards the term ‘ghost story’:...
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The Transformation of E F Benson
My lunchtime reading of late has been The Horror Horn, a collection of ghost stories by E F Benson, published in 1974 by Panther, with a typically excellent cover by Bruce Pennington. In the 70s,...
View ArticleMe & Horror: My first horror story
I wrote my first horror story before I read any. When I was about 10 or 11, my English teacher gave us a lesson on M R James. He told us the plot of “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You”, and followed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Oliver Onions’ Ghost Stories
I first came across Oliver Onions through his most famous ghost story, “The Beckoning Fair One”, in a book called 4 Classic Ghostly Tales. A story of artistic obsession, it’s about a writer, Oleron,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman
‘Is there an opposite of haunted?’ asks Steven Naremore, after he and his family move into the Hollow, an isolated, quirky house in the West Country. They’ve been noticing strange things happening, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s haunted house novel is so good, everyone who writes about the book is statutorily obliged to quote it: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely...
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Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair
This 2006 book from Wordsworth Editions reprints May Sinclair’s 1923 collection of the same name, plus one other long story, “The Intercessor” (from The English Review, July 1911), the first ghost...
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
(most probably) Emily Brontë by her brother, Branwell Wuthering Heights (1847) is the subject of my favourite book review ever, in a letter from Pre-Raphaelite artist & poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
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The Haunting by Margaret Mahy
1986 paperback, art by Alun Hood Researching Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows for a recent Mewsings, I was intrigued by the book that won the Carnegie Medal the year after it, Margaret Mahy’s The...
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The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively
1983 cover by Yvonne Gilbert Without planning to, I’ve been working through some Carnegie Medal winners recently, starting with Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, then Margaret Mahy’s The Haunting. I’ve...
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