Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
discussion
What makes a ghost story scary?
date
newest »
newest »
I think the effect of ths ghost story has a lot to do with the reader's willingness to play along....to want to be scared. Long time ago i remember being genuinely scared by Stephen King's " Sometimes They Comeback ". I must add that i was in high school and simply did not know better....It's tough to truly frighten someone from the page of the book and the only effect horror fiction had on me lately is a feeling of being creeped out. I'm still waiting to be scared.
House of Leaves sounds great, but... £17.50 FOR A PAPERBACK! They're taking the piss. I'm going to have to wait till the price comes down.I enjoyed The Little Stranger to begin with, but became increasingly fed up with the author hammering home her subtext, apparently thinking I was too stupid to spot it for myself. Also, elevating subtext to excessive visibility smacks to me of "literary" authors who are slumming in horror fiction - they think they're the first writers ever to spot whatever metaphor it is they're peddling, whereas of course horror and fantasy have always had gazillions of these without the need for them to be emphasised.
Thinking about this, I find that the things that disturb me in fiction are the same things that disturb me in life. Malice - particularly malice that is excessive and persistent: the indifference of things to people; failures of understanding - as when a character makes a trivial mistake that sets in train an inescapable, fatal course of events for which nobody is really to blame; and situations in which people suffer because of and through their virtues. It's an anti-Christian dynamic, in which everything you were told about the world proves to have been a comforting lie to cover an unbearable truth.Shifts of perspective can also be very effective. I've always thought that Lovecraft was good at this; inducing a sort of vertigo. Flann O'Brien in The Third Policeman - which is on one level a ghost story, though not often described as such - manages this brilliantly.
I'm afraid I'm among those who won't be recommending House of Leaves, though. I read it because I knew a chap who'd devoted a large chunk of his PhD thesis to it, and I don't think I've ever been so disappointed. Very long, repetitive, tedious, and unoriginal. The more postmodernist fiction you've read, the more tricksy and derivative it seems. Try before you buy.
But I will recommend Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park, which like The Turn of the Screw uses the classic device of the narrator who may be going out of his mind to create doubt about the veracity and meaning of the supernatural elements. I found parts of this genuinely disturbing, and very little contemporary fiction does that to me. It's much harder than just amping up the gore and horror.
Nice list of disturbing things, Paul, thank you. I particularly like the "trivial mistake setting events in motion" device in literature and films. Reminds me too of stories in which an otherwise sympathetic character does one bad thing, and is then obliged to do more bad things to cover up their first action, and then events just spin out of control. Reminds you that evil isn't necessarily something that's intentionally done by evil people, but is a consequence of ordinary people making a bad decision. The example here that springs to mind is Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (filmed by Sam Raimi).In brief, I find evil actions far more frightening when they're performed by otherwise sympathetic characters.
What you write about Shatterday, Paul no 2, reminds me of the bit in Lost Highway where the spooky Robert Blake character tells Bill Pullman to phone home... Also that bit in Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness where the narrator crosses town to explore the grassy knoll he can see from his window...
Lots of good comments. Alberto Manguel defines fantastic literature as "the impossible seeping into the possible", and says that its appeal lies "not in the answers it dutifully provides, but in the questions". For some people, that premise is itself scary; though of course it also allows for the possibility of astonishment, awe, etc - which is what I love about weird literature.
The writer's technique, and what is left out, so the reader is made to think and question what is happening. Throwing in a bunch of gore just turns me off. I would rather use my own imagination.The Willows is excellent, highly recommended, but it is a bit slower paced (compaired to modern stuff), like many older writings are.
all discussions on this book
|
post a new topic
Some ghost stories I found frightening when I read them: the stories of M.R. James, Stephen King's The Shining, Peter Straub's Ghost Story, Oliver Onions' The Beckoning Fair One, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House...