20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

The Many Faces of Van Helsing, edited by Jeanne Cavelos.

if it were possible to scour from my mind the memory of having read these stories, I would happily do so, just so that I could have the pleasure of reading them again for the first time.

frisson

compulsion

I Love Galesburg in the Springtime.

vertiginous

insubstantial

pneumatic

incandescent

incomprehension.

happenstance.

Talmudically-speaking.

No matter how high I went for a moment, I always came down in the end, same as anyone else.

Kafka

Malamud

What happened? Did he run out of air?

‘Ran out of sky,’ I said.

Mickey Spillane

mandibles

warble.

culvert

rheumy

lassitude

habit which never failed to put a kind of simian

aberration

furtive

paradoxically

exuberance

rheumatism

churlish.

palpable

quirt

squalls.

futilely

prismatic

scintillating

flotilla

cadaverous,

hermetically

rapt.

acclimate.

subliminal.

comprehensively.

solicitous,

dewy,

parapsychology.

Something that

doesn’t know it’s alive, obviously can’t be expected to know when it’s dead.

mastodons,’

plateau,