When Lafcadio Hearn stepped onto the shores of Japan in 1890, he began writing ghost stories. On assignment from Harper’s Magazine, Hearn was charged to explore and explain this undiscovered country to eager Americans. That his answer was to write about Japan’s spirits should have surprised no one; Hearn had a predilection for the macabre and uncanny. But while a previous sojourn in New Orleans had supplied him with ore for his imagination, in his new home he struck the mother lode. Japan is the most haunted country on Earth.
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Most people know that Japan is particularly good at ghost stories. As they should be; they have been working at it for some time. Theater, literature, art, or film—Japan’s storytelling is inherently haunted. Indeed, a history of Japanese literature is a history of ghost stories.
Category Archives: Fiction
The Resurgence of Ghost Stories
Several new books intend to supplant vampires and others horrors in popular imagination with ghosts, writes Sarah Hughes, such as books by The Woman in Black author, Susan Hill
Hughes writes, “Not since the heyday of MR James and WW Jacobs has the ghost story been so in vogue, but why? ‘We’re definitely seeing a resurgence after horror has held sway for a long time,’ says Mosse. ‘The thing about horror is that it’s not that subtle; it’s a straightforward chase about the terrible thing that’s going to get you. With a ghost story the whole thing is, “Is it coming? Is everything in your head?” Ghost fiction plays on those fears – which is why I describe The Taxidermist’s Daughter as not a whodunnit but a whydunnit.'”
Editor Angus Cargill tells Hughes genre fiction is growing in popularity. “We’re definitely seeing less of the sort of snobbery there used to be. I love it when writers cross genres, so it’s great to see someone like William [Gay], who was known as a literary southern gothic writer, move more towards horror, or [David] Mitchell writing a ghost story.”
Not quite in this vein, but I’m told the movie Lake Mungo is a quite scary ghost story, which while having a feel like Paranormal Activity, puts it to shame with a substantive story and acting.
A review of ‘Death’s Doors’
Nathan James Norman reviews Death’s Doors here. It appears that I achieved the effects I was going for, with at least one reader.
I found myself highlighting numerous passages in the book. Like C.S. Lewis I find Lars Walker quite quotable. Typically, I don’t go out of my way to notate fiction. I marked twenty-nine passages in this book.
Perfect Book Trailer
This may be the perfect book trailer for this collection of bizarre short stories by Lincoln Michel, which might be what one should expect from a writer whose work has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, and The Believer. Notice it doesn’t describe the book directly. It appears to give us a flavor of the character of at least some of the stories in it.
The Millions writers say, “Michel’s stories are often an uncanny combination of sinister and funny, tender and sad. Laura van den Berg calls them ‘mighty surrealist wonders, mordantly funny and fiercely intelligent,’ and many of them will soon be released together in Michel’s first story collection Upright Beasts.”
From the book: “Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. In these short stories, we are the upright beasts, doing battle with our darker, weirder impulses as the world collapses around us.”
‘Deliver Us From Evil,’ by Peter Turnbull
Years ago, while going through a period of tight finances (come to think of it, I still am), I took to borrowing light reading from the library, which is often a challenge when you’re as picky a reader as I am. I happened on a couple of English mysteries that pleased me very much, but neither the author nor the titles stuck in my memory. But recently, employing my hard-won new skills as an Information Professional, I did some hunting and found the books. Even better, some of them are available for Kindle. And so I offer, for your consideration, Deliver Us From Evil, by Peter Turnbull, one of the Hennessey and Yellich mysteries.
Hennessey and Yellich are police detectives in the ancient city of York, England, a place of great interest to Viking enthusiasts, though Vikings are rarely mentioned in my reading so far. Hennessey is an older cop, a widower who carries on a quiet affair with the female medical examiner. Yellich is younger and a family man, the father of a boy with Down’s Syndrome. There are also a couple more members on their team at this point in the series, each well drawn and having their own story.
The book begins with a beautifully written scene in which an early morning walker, on a frigid spring morning, discovers a woman sitting near the edge of a canal. Discovering that she is dead, he contacts the police. Forensic examination shows that she froze to death, but was probably strangled first. The strangling apparently failed, she revived, but then she succumbed to the cold.
Inquiry into her past reveals a dark story – this is a woman who has cheated and stolen all her life, and who may have done worse things. The question is not who had motive to kill her, but who among many she has hurt actually did it.
The story runs along logical, police procedural lines, and involves a trip to Canada by some of the team. There are no car chases, no gunfights, not even a fist fight. Just patient inquiry into human memories, deceptions, and motivations. I love this kind of book. I wish there were more of them.
A strange affectation of author Turnbull’s is that he opens each chapter with an old-fashioned synopsis:
Wednesday, March twenty-fifth, 15.43 hours – 22.30 hours in which more is learned of the deceased and Mr and Mrs Yellich are at home to the gracious reader.
A little precious, perhaps, but amusing as long as other writers don’t copy it.
Highly recommended.
Compulsory Reading for Writers
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— P.G.Wodehouse (@wodehouseoffice) October 16, 2015
Quiz: Rejected Novels
Author Marlon James, who won this year’s Man Booker award for his work A Brief History of Seven Killings, said his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected seventy-eight times before being published in 2005.
“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read,” he said.
The Guardian states many critically acclaimed books were rejected at one time or another and not just by mothers who won’t surrender their children to state-issued mind-control agents. Here’s a quiz on “great rejected books.”
‘An End to a Silence,’ by W. H. Clark
The book under consideration here is an example of a type of novel I like very much. It’s a “small” mystery, localized and character-driven. No international conspiracies; no shadowy government agents. An End to a Silence is the sort of mystery that’s produced more in England than in America nowadays, and as it happens the author is English, though the story is set in America, in a small town in Montana, and seems right at home.
Detective Newton is a burnt-out case, a cop whose career stalled long ago. Now he’s just marking time until retirement. But he’s called to a local nursing home, where an old man’s death has been identified as murder. When Newton sees the victim, he’s suddenly galvanized. This man, Bill O’Donnell, is a suspect in 25 year old case, the disappearance of O’Donnell’s own grandson. Newton is certain that O’Donnell killed the boy and hid the body, despite the fact that he was a kindly man, loved in the community and active in his church.
A new policeman has come to help. His name is Ward (he never explains whether it’s his first or last name), and he’s straight out of a Hollywood western. He’s from Texas, he’s tall and lean and taciturn, he wears a cowboy hat, and he has secrets. Along with investigating the murder, he gets involved in protecting a local woman from her abusive, junkie ex-husband.
The story is all about secrets, and what people do to protect themselves and those they love. There’s a surprising reversal at the end, giving us a resolution that’s not entirely satisfying, but true to life as we know it.
I enjoyed An End to a Silence very much, and regret that this is the author’s first novel. I fear I’ll forget his name before there’s another. Sex, language, and violence are relatively mild, and on top of that the Christians in the book are treated respectfully.
Recommended.
American Zombies: Enemies Next Door
Kurt Schlichter ruminates on our current obsession with zombies. Not long ago, many mainstream stories focused on foreign threats or nuclear fallout. Today, we entertain ourselves with mysterious outbreaks that turn people into flesh-eaters.
“What does it say,” Schlichter asks, “that our collective subconscious senses less of a threat from fanatical outsiders who, in the last couple decades, have killed thousands of us via terrorism, than from each other?
. . . The foreigners are a threat, but that’s under control. What is out of control, or what seems like it is out of control, is our society itself.”
Fantasy Dressed Up as Sci-Fi
Author John C. Wright argues against the ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ camp of science fiction with his own Space Princess camp. One side says we will never find intelligent life on other planets or build our own colonies there. The other side says, not only is there intelligent life out there, but the women are remarkably hot and need to be rescued by noble earthmen.
One side says, “Psionics is just magic wearing a lab coat.” The other side says, “Without psionics, there is no way to speak and understand the space princess when you first meet her. Learning a new space-language without psionic aid involves many long and boring sessions with philologists and translators and grammarians, which is all hogwash and humbug. Space Princesses can read minds just enough so that you can talk to them. That is settled.”
You can see where this is going.
Is this kind of argument having assumed your conclusions really that different from the supposedly serious argument put forward in this Canadian propoganda, which says Science is a political value we must all support?