What to Read When You lot Want a Ghost Story, Onetime or New

The ghost story was designed for the curt form. It emerged a long time ago, from sociology and oral legends; some of our oldest stories are ghost stories. In horror literature, one identify where the genre offset appeared was through inset narratives in Gothic novels. Within a larger story, one character would tell a tale of the returning dead. This served not so much to further the larger plot every bit to deepen and derange it. Like a ghost itself, the ghost story is an interruption of the present. And the scene of a ghost story's telling is, like a nightmare, a brilliant and emotional reality within a larger, more mundane 1.

While in that location have been beautiful novel-length ghost stories written since these early days, this list focuses on my favorite short ghost stories, primarily from the Western literary canon. Many of the following come from the "golden age" of the genre, which ran from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century in, America, the Britain, and other parts of Europe. Many of our contemporary expectations of the ghost story—across literature, pic, and television—can be traced to this era. It's no wonder that in true ghost stories—whether told on city ghost tours, ghost hunts, reality Television receiver shows, or in conversations with believers—ghosts are so frequently described as looking "Victorian." It seems that the Victorian era is as far back as we can imagine someone being expressionless. I don't think information technology's a coincidence that this was the era when the living were showtime able to be photographed, and when many people entertained themselves with ghostly tales.

The ghost story interests me both as a way to think about the globe and as a source of entertainment. At that place is tragedy here, and horror, and questions about trauma, history, and time. But e'er since I was one-time enough to read, I have found neat condolement in this genre. It'south a topic I explore in my new book, a memoir about horror called Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God.

A actually good and scary ghost story focuses me. It pulls me from my ordinary, self-focused fears and connects me with something older and more mysterious. The books below have been chosen for their particular stories, and are listed in chronological club by the date of the story's publication.

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In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu
Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish writer of the mid-nineteenth century, is one of the major figures of the golden historic period of ghost stories, coming towards the before side of that timeline. He'south cited as an influence for horror writers similar M. R. James and Bram Stoker, who ended up eclipsing him in fame—I'm not sure why. Le Fanu'south stories have the feeling of being written by someone who truly believes in the supernatural. This drove was published merely before Le Fanu's death, and was written over a long period of grief and isolation following the loss of his married woman. It feels like this state of listen, combined with Le Fanu'southward expertise in religion and occultism, gives the tales their eerie power. My favorite is still "Dark-green Tea," an oftentimes-anthologized story of spiritual horror. It tells of a preacher and theologian whose study of magical beliefs (and the philosophies of Emmanuel Swedenborg) summons a demonic spirit to his side. But the horror goes further than that. The clergyman, like and then many of Le Fanu's characters, is poised on the edge of suicidal despair. We larn that he's one of many modern intellectuals who feel this style. The spirit at his side, if information technology is indeed a spirit, but drives him further into preexisting psychic hurting.

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant
I love Guy de Maupassant's gilded and pessimistic fiction. Though he more often than not wrote about complicated class and gender relationships in Parisian society, he too has a number of supernatural stories. "The Horla" is one of these, and is almost claustrophobically interior. Through a character's diary entries, it tells of a man who believes he is becoming possessed by an invisible, malevolent entity "that lives on milk and water." The spirit first presents itself as an illness and then overtakes the homo's perception of life. Maupassant, by all accounts, was a person haunted both by mental illness and syphilis, which is what killed him in 1893. I imagine the author's own feel is reflected—or prophesied—in these pages.

The Groovy God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen
Like Le Fanu, Arthur Machen seems to take been a truthful believer in the supernatural. Equally the son of an Anglican priest, Machen grew upwards to create his own magical, esoteric grade of Christianity, and these beliefs reveal themselves in his fiction. Three favorite stories from this book, which all focus on Machen'south unusual definitions of evil and his depictions of the occult, are The Great God Pan (a novella), "The White People," and "The Inmost Calorie-free."

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn
Yous may have encountered some of these stories in Masaki Kobayashi'due south Kwaidan (1965), which adapts four of Hearn'due south tales. The motion picture retells ane of my favorites, which in this volume is called "The Reconciliation." It's a tale of a ghostly wife who was abandoned by her Samurai husband and their eerie reunion. Japanese Ghost Stories draws from several of Hearn's books of ghost stories and legends, which he collected while living in Nippon. Hearn himself was very unusual: born on a Greek island, abandoned by his parents, and raised in Ireland and England, he spent his life traveling the earth and immersing himself in diverse cultures. He finally settled in Nippon at the terminate of his life, where he married a local woman (who reportedly gathered ghost stories with him), and raised a child. Hearn had a detail interest in the behavior of Japanese Buddhism, and and then those rituals and entities show upwards in a number of his tales. Hearn has a wonderfully understated fashion of narrating, which contrasts with the wild paranormal events he describes. My favorite stories are the tragic ones, which tend to focus on suffering female spirits. In addition to "The Reconciliation," I like "A Passional Karma" and "The Story of O-Kame."

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary past M. R. James
Anybody who reads ghost stories knows Thou. R. James, whose work came to define the gilt age period. But I'm recommending him again because he is so good. In a fashion—though I don't hateful this as a criticism—James writes the same story over and once again, with but slight variations. I phone call these kinds of tales "professor horror," because they describe academic characters (professors, archivists, librarians) who are fatigued into the supernatural and must utilise their academic preparation to try to get out of danger. James, who made a career as a medievalist and high-ranking academic administrator, tells of a world of bachelor scholars who are too bodacious of their own expertise to recognize the perils of the spirit world. James's stories are likewise eminently literary—concerned with letters, deeds, journals, telegrams, translations, and ciphers. Ii favorites in this collection are "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You My Lad," which is most a haunted professor on vacation, and "The Mezzotint," about a haunted portrait that reveals the subconscious past.

Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories edited past Mike Ashley
Perhaps the chief thing I similar about this anthology of obscure British ghost stories is that so many of these authors are unfamiliar names. The editor, Mike Ashley, has called stories from literary magazines that were never reprinted after their starting time appearances. Ashley prefaces each with a note about its writer, often telling readers that he has no thought who the author was! I favorite, "The River's Edge" by Mary Schultze, is a sentimental, somewhat religious ghost story from 1912. About Schultze, Ashley writes: "another mystery name… She had a dozen or so stories in the cheap weekly magazines merely before the First World War just none of those publications provided a clue to her identity. There were several by that name live in Britain at the time, but none identified as a writer." The second I'd recommend, "The Business firm of The Black Evil" past Eric Purves, is a tale from 1929 well-nigh a necromancer's house that has become a kind of black pigsty. Like Schultze, Purves is an unknown author. Ashley tells united states of america: "I'one thousand not fifty-fifty sure its writer wrote annihilation else. It's certainly not a name I've come across elsewhere and I can't find in information technology in whatsoever index or archive." Something about the ghostliness of these forgotten writers increases my interest in the stories they've written.

Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories by Silvina Ocampo
"The House Made of Sugar" is an unusual haunted firm story, written by Ocampo, an Argentine poet and fiction writer from the same circumvolve as Jorge Luis Borges. Though Ocampo'southward piece of work is typically called surrealist, "The Firm Made of Sugar" reads as a ghost story to me. Information technology exists somewhere between the uncanny psychological and the truly supernatural. In it, a married woman has a superstitious aversion to living anywhere other people have lived before. Essentially, she fears the dead and being haunted. Her husband, who narrates the story, is unable to fulfill this foreign demand. He moves them into a sparklingly white, recently remodeled house that but appears to be brand-new, then lies to her near information technology. Soon, the wife'south prophecy begins to take shape: the personality of the business firm'south onetime occupant takes over her own. Things get stranger from there.

Don't Look At present by Daphne du Maurier
Ii stories in this drove, "The Birds" and "Don't Expect Now," were made into major horror films, and Don't Wait Now (1973) is one of my favorite 1970s ghost movies. Du Maurier'southward story of the same name is just every bit bracing. If y'all aren't already familiar with the plot, information technology tells the story of a couple who recently lost a kid, and an unusual pair of psychic sisters who want to evangelize a terrible message. I besides recommend "Split Second," which is near a proper English language woman—a widow with a child away at boarding school—who ane day has a feeling that something horrible will happen. She goes on a walk and so, all of a sudden, everything in her life changes; information technology'due south every bit if she'south been replaced. Information technology'southward a tense and realistically drawn mystery, with Du Maurier'due south favorite motif of clairvoyance.

Cold Mitt in Min e past Robert Aickman
Robert Aickman, an English writer of the 1960s and '70s, is considered a writer of "strange tales" or "weird fiction," just nosotros could just as easily say he was a writer of ghost stories. In Aickman's piece of work, however, the hauntings are less obvious—more than of a subtle, unsettling atmosphere than a soul that appears, dragging chains and moaning. To this end, Aickman'southward piece of work tends towards the misanthropic and paranoid, habitation on human failings, fixations, and moments of awkwardness. My favorite stories in this drove are "The Hospice" and "The Aforementioned Dog," which both tell of seemingly mundane circumstances that are twisted but enough off-kilter to become disturbing. In another collection, Dark Entries, I recommend "The Schoolhouse Friend" and "Ringing the Changes," which both approach the idea of a haunting, but in dramatically different ways. An Aickman story always ends without a articulate resolution; this uncertainty is part of why his stories are so affecting.

Books of Blood, Vol. Five by Clive Barker
Clive Barker is some other horror author I came to through moving-picture show. He published the short story "The Forbidden" in his multi-role horror anthology, Books of Blood, and it was adapted into the archetype 1992 ghost film Candyman. While many of the beats of the film'south narrative are there in the original text, Barker's setting is unlike. His story takes identify in Liverpool, where Barker grew up, and tells of a graduate student researching urban legends in a low-income apartment building. So while issues of class are central, Barker's tale lacks the American film'south improver of racial trauma, which comes through its Chicago Cabrini Green setting. These alterations are especially interesting to consider as Jordan Peele'south new Candyman approaches its releases. Regardless of what happened to Barker's story afterwards it made the spring from page to screen, "The Forbidden" is yet tense, gripping, and eloquent.

Dark Water by Koji Suzuki
Koji Suzuki is known for creating the popular Ring serial, which began with his novel, then spread into many films in Japan, America, and elsewhere. But his curt story "Floating Water," contained in this collection, was also adapted as the horror pic Dark Water, which got its own Hollywood remake. It's a story about a unmarried mother and her immature girl, who move into a desolate flat building and encounter signs of trauma and the spirit of a piddling girl. I find the characterization in Suzuki'due south short story to be more than interesting than in the movies. We become a greater sense of the mother'due south interior, and though she'south less likable, she's more than circuitous.

Through the Wood by Emily Carroll
This collection of illustrated stories explores themes of violence, decease, and grief with the simple power of the oldest fairy tales. I would almost recommend the volume to children (and would accept loved something like this when I was a child), merely the stories are and then dark. Carroll'due south sparsely worded narration and dialogue give just plenty for us to enter her images and narratives. She shows the states macabre interiors, faces full of fright, and exquisite menstruation costumes through washes of paint and pen. I especially liked "My Friend Jana," a ghost story about two friends, i of whom is psychic. It'south filled with ink-blotch shadows and chalky ghosts.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
Within this recently translated collection of short stories by Argentine author Mariana Enriquez, I discovered a haunted house tale that stayed with me. "Adela's House" is narrated by a adult female looking back on her childhood, retelling a series of frightening and mysterious events. The story revolves around her as a daughter, her brother, and their neighborhood friend, Adela. The three children tell ghost stories and watch horror films together, reveling in these thrills. And then, somewhat by accident, they get part of a real horror story that will stick with the town as a legend, passed through generations of other kids. It'southward written in a realistic and unsentimental way, to moving effect.

Vision by Julia Gfrörer
This is a very new, curt graphic novel by a very gothic artist. Gfrörer's unproblematic blackness pen lines are spare and precise, evoking the subtlest change of expression through a few wavy marks on a face. The images, similar the stories, are beautiful and vulnerable—almost romantic—simply ever atomic number 82 to nighttime places. While some of Gfrörer'southward earlier graphic novels offered stories of how the living deal with horrific circumstances and dead bodies, Vision deals with expiry, disease, and societal pressures, while also beingness a ghost story. It's set in a vague by—what looks to be the Victorian era—and tells of an unhappy flagman whose closest friend is a spirit in her mirror. It gets a bit graphic, so be forewarned.

And to close out this wonderful list, nosotros just had to include Claire'south new book, Bluish Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God, out now from Repeater Books! – Ed.

Bluish Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God by Claire Cronin
Blue Low-cal of the Screen is about what information technology means to be afraid—nigh immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us upward at night. A artistic-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing upward in a devoutly Cosmic family unit, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts. As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, similar an antiquarian in an Thou. R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of cabalistic texts and cursed archives. In this mode, Blue Low-cal of the Screen tells the story of the author's conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural. Function memoir, function ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Calorie-free of the Screen is not just a book about horror, only a piece of work of horror itself.

Claire Cronin is a writer and musician currently based in California. She has published poetry and nonfiction and is the author of the chapbook A Spirit Is a Mood Without a Body. As a musician, Cronin has released records on contained labels, toured nationally, and been featured in Pitchfork and The FADER. More than from this author →