Jesse > Recent Status Updates

obviously Stephano is going to be Olaf, which was pretty apparent when he is first mentioned, only because I can’t imagine the orphans ever getting away from Olaf. There goes the neighborhood. Oh god am I going to have to see Uncle Monty disbelieving them when they tell him that Stephano is Olaf?? AUUGH

What??? Amazon is trying to bill “The Ghost Ship” as chilling? It’s a cute story!

“The Ghost Ship”, by Richard Middleton

I think that you could call this magical realism? The town of Fairfield is very comfortable with its ghosts, who are basically a second community in the town, who lead their own ghost lives. A storm blows the titular ship into town, alone save a ghost captain. This is a whimsical, fun story, and I would love to read more stories in Middleton’s Fairfield.

“The Three Sisters”, by W. W. Jacobs

This is a traditionally structured ghost story, so it has the cadence of a folk tale. Three sisters, one dies, then one turns into a miser and covets the wealth inherited by the other and, well, the older, dead sister makes good on her prediction! Ursula’s pre-death bit about “a lonely woman’s life is scarce worth living” hits all sorts of wrong.

“The Phantom Rickshaw”, by Rudyard Kipling

Kipling is a fun writer. A British military jerk has an affair with a married woman in India and then cruelly spurns her, completely shutting her out, and hating her more for her pleas to be friends. She comes back in The Phantom Rickshaw, but as a ghost she wants nothing more than what she wanted in life. Of course, this ruins the jerk narrator’s.

“How Love Came to Professor Guildea”, by Robert S. Hichens

One of the more bizarre stories, a drama that involves an Anglican priest, his friend the professor, and… a sex ghost? It’s partly a parable, but whether that is what Hichens intended or merely a surface-level reading offered by the surviving character isn’t clear to me on first reading. There seem to be ace, maybe homoerotic undertones.

“The Haunted Baronet”, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Um, this was disappointing. This book spends a lot of time establishing Phillip as The Saddest Boi and starts to cook when he inevitably dies and comes back to take revenge on his familial foes, the Mardykes. The fever-dream adventure of Sir Bale was pretty cool. But it ends on a whimper. I don’t know if Bale’s acceptance of his death is supposed to redeem him.

It took a long time to get here but the moping, effeminate Philip has died and come back to life and undergone a sinister change in the process. He is so depressed and resigned to his fate before his death that it’s a bit maudlin and the emotional story has less to do with his revenge (and the revenge of his family) and more to do with the breathless anticipation of Sir Bale’s fatal comeuppance.

Excited to read this since Carmilla was such a good read!!

“An Eddy On the Floor”, by Bernard Capes

A retelling of “The Cask of Amontillado” in a prison with a supernatural bent. It’s hard to get into because Polyhistor is so full of himself and there is an aside from a female editor who mocks him, thus sort of distancing the reader early on. Once the narrator runs into the medium and is clued into the cell, well, it gets much, much better.

“Amour Dure” by Vernon Lee

Starts out as the salacious history of an Italian maiden whose love gave her absolute power over men. The MC slowly proves that her influence extends nearly 300 years after her death. The girl shares her name with the Medea of Greek myth, but Jason’s Medea’s personal tragedy was that her love and beauty never ensured the loyalty any man.

“Fullcircle” by John Buchan

A more or less benign haunted house transforms its radical socialite tenants into folks who enjoy good country living. There isn’t a ghost, per se, just the undeniable influence of the former owner from beyond the grave, perhaps a haunting more of a very genial and relaxed mood.

“The Haunted and the Haunters” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

So the first part of this story is a detailed account of a dude spending the night in a haunted house out of curiosity. The second half goes off the rails and becomes so metaphysical that it risks becoming indecipherable as the main character, an occultist, engages a master of the occult. I’m fascinated by the theosophistry but I liked the haunting!!

“A Terrible Vengeance” by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

This is a ghost story but Mr. Davis, the manservant, steals the show and turns this into a melodrama. As a coquette who is making sport of her public suitor, Lucy doesn’t inspire much sympathy, and this distancing from her - and her aunt and uncle’s moral outrage at her behavior, with Biblical didactism - turns the emotional story into a farce.

LOL THE MANSERVANT IS GONNA BLACKMAIL MURRAY

Okay this ghost story slaps. The manservant thinks that the wet footprints are actually a sign that his master is going to come into a ton of money and starts buttering him up. Dramatic irony for comedy works and isn’t emotionally frustrating unlike dramatic irony in romances!

Really, goodreads???? A Highlander For Christmas because I read Douglas Adams’s Mostly Harmless?? You gotta be jokin’ me!!

Oh no lol. AHHHH I got got!! This is a novella originally published as a serial and the cliffhanger end leads you to believe that something bad happened to Davis! You cheeky Victorians

…and he just murdered his manservant? lol F this Murray asshole

So it’s obvious at this point that Murray drowned Lucy because he tried to break off his secret courtship before marrying a much higher station girl for money… and she probably went nuclear on him because she had just told her public boyfriend that she wouldn’t marry HIM because she was sure of her relationship with Murray. AnD hEr DrOwNeD gHoSt HaUnTs HiS tReAcHeRoUs AsS

“The North Mail” by Amelia B. Edwards

A young man gets lost hunting and follows some lone wanderer to an isolated house where he converses with a metaphysician. The host offers a shortcut by way of a mail coach so that he can get home faster. I am only just now realizing the old man basically set the young guy up to be killed given that the fate of the mail coach is apparently common knowledge.

“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell

Okay, this one works. It’s a long setup to get the nurse and her orphaned charge in her relatives’ house but once they are in we get a compelling story about the ghost of a child who is attempting to lure another to a similar death. It’s sufficiently creepy and the stakes feel more real once the first secondhand sighting is followed by a firsthand encounter.

“Mad Monkton” by Wilkie Collins

A gothic quest to retrieve a corpse in order to break a familial curse. Here, as with the previous story, it’s more psychological as the narrator never sees the ghost. He is more of a witness to the effect that the ghost has on his friend. The story is at its best when the narrator discovers the body, between the atmosphere of horror and the snuff-toting Italian monk.

“No. 1 Branch Line - The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens

The ghost in this story is more of a specter warning of ill-fortune for a man working at a post in England’s burgeoning railway system. It’s a neat tale as it’s based in Dickens’s travelogue, with the worker he is interviewing gradually taking the narrator into his confidence on the strange goings-on that he has personally witnessed.

“Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe

I guess that this is a ghost story? The man’s young lover promises to make her presence known to him after his death and she does so, for a while. On the whole this… vignette has way more in common with the poetic fantasies of Lovecraft and C. A. Smith, those being inspired by Lord Dunsany. Which isn’t bad, I just struggle to see it as a classic ghost story.

because A Turn of the Screw is considered to be an archetypal ghost story and I want to have it in mind before I read Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (which I know in the end has nothing to do with ghosts)