Ever had that dream where you’re tumbling, falling towards impending doom? Sarah Wilby has, and when she tells us about her all too real fall, it’s not from this side of the grave. It’s also the sensation that a reader of Smith’s latest novel experiences, rushing through her world, on an often exhilarating ride towards the end, expecting a coup de grace of a twist. Yet – and this is the real twist – it never comes; you’re simply served it up at the beginning. Sarah died in a prank climbing into a dumb waiter on the sixth floor of the Global Hotel. This leaves us to follow Sarah’s lingering ghost as she demands answers from her eyeless rotting corpse, and visits her grieving suburban family. Hardest hit, her sister has taken to the street outside the Global, obsessed with her sister’s ill-fated fall.
Margot McGovern reviews Susan Hill’s Gothic chiller The Woman in Black (1983).
Margot McGovern August 11, 2015
When a thick yellow fog settles over London, budding lawyer Arthur Kipps is thrilled to be sent to the remote seaside village of Crythin Gifford to attend the funeral of his firm’s client, Mrs Drablow, and to sort through her papers at the ominously named Eel Marsh House. In fact, he anticipates it will be a bit of a holiday. However, when Arthur finds himself followed by a mysterious woman in black, he begins to wonder whether he might have been wiser to remain in fog-bound London.
hen I am emailed by pupils studyingThe Woman in Blackfor GCSE and A-level, many refer to it as "gothic", and indeed it forms part of a university course in gothic literature. But although the book has something in common with the pure gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, it is really only a distant cousin of the genre. It is a ghost story – not a horror story, not a thriller – and not a gothic novel; although the terms are often used very loosely, they are not by any means the same thing.
Susan Hill
I set out to write a ghost story in the classic 19th-century tradition, a full-length one. There have never been many, writers perhaps having felt the form would not stretch successfully. By the time I began mine, in the 1980s, full-length ghost stories seemed to have died out altogether. I read and studied the Jameses, Henry and MR, and Dickens, and I also had beside me the "bible" –Night Visitors by Julia Briggs(still the best study of the form).
The Little Stranger tells of a doctor whose profession, friendship, and romantic interests become entangled with a family living in a house that may be haunted. The novel is told in first person, past tense, double-I from the perspective of a doctor named Dr. Faraday, looking back on a series of unusual events that took place three years prior to when he’s writing his memories down.
Sarah Waters combines spookiness and social observation in a gripping tale, says Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel Saturday 23 May 2009
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t is 1947; the nation is exhausted by victory, and neither the National Health Service nor the National Trust has yet come along to pick up the pieces. The scars of war heroes are fresh and great country houses are battered from the military's occupation, their parks dug over for vegetable plots. The civilian population is depressed by rationing, homelessness, postwar gloom and austerity. Dr Faraday is a country GP practising in Warwickshire, in the area where he was born, to poor parents who sacrificed everything for his education. Unmarried, he is slouching into an impecunious and unloved middle age, apprehensive about the coming changes in medical practice and pessimistic about his future. Many of his patients live in rural slums; he has never been taken up by the local gentry. Socially, he finds himself awkwardly poised between classes. He is conscious that some of the boys with whom he shared a school bench are now no more than labourers. He has grasped his opportunities, but the strain shows; he is unable to eradicate, within himself, the signs of his past struggle.
REVIEWED BY CHRISTY ANN CONLIN PUBLISHED MARCH 9, 2011
It's 1937, and 28-year-old Jack Miller, down on his luck and desperate for opportunity, falls into the chance of a lifetime: being the wireless operator for a scientist expedition heading from London to the high north. Fogs and the spectre of war might hang over London, but what could possibly be over the Arctic except the midnight sun? Little does the team know what lurks in acclaimed British writer Michelle Paver's Dark Matter: A Ghost Story.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders review – agile tale of loss and resistance
A grieving, restless Abraham Lincoln is drawn to the space between life and death in this superb debut novel from the writer better known for his short stories Alex Clark Sanday 5 March 2017
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hen George Saunders won the inaugural Folio prize in 2014 for his story collection Tenth of December, I had the good fortune to interview him in the immediate aftermath. Charmingly open and expansive, he humorously recounted the false starts to his writing life without a hint of faux self-deprecation. Once, he told me, while still gainfully employed as a technical writer, he had written a Joyce-influenced novel about a Mexican wedding where he’d been a guest that had somehow grown to unmanageable proportions. He gave it to his wife, Paula, to read. After some hours, he saw her with her head in her hands. The novel was history.
It's easy to send thoughts and prayers and move on if you're not among those whose lives were altered by the storms. But natural disasters continue to destroy lives long after the damage is done. In his new book Ghosts of the Tsunami, author Richard Lloyd Parry considers the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami, which took thousands of lives, and which haunts its survivors to this day. It's a wrenching chronicle of a disaster that, six years later, still seems incomprehensible.
ka Kurniawan’s first novel Beauty Is a Wound has already been compared to García Márquez and Rushdie – it is long, it recounts the history of an “exotic” country and it is studded with supernatural happenings, so never mind that Kurniawan is bawdy where García Márquez is plangent, or that his occasional direct addresses to the reader owe more to oral storytelling than to postmodernism. Such lofty comparisons might threaten to obscure the writing itself. It is lucky, then, that his books are so distinct and memorable.
‘Beauty Is a Wound’ and ‘Man Tiger’ by Eka Kurniawan
Jon Fasman Septiembre 9, 2015
In what is presumably late 1965, as Indonesia is racked by violence in the wake of a failed coup blamed on Communists, a gravedigger named Kamino hits upon a novel method of seduction: He allows himself to be possessed by the spirit of a recently murdered Communist so that the Communist’s daughter can speak with her father one last time. In gratitude, she cooks Kamino dinner. A week later, after Kamino has buried 1,232 Communists in one mass grave, she accepts his marriage proposal. By the time the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, Eka Kurniawan’s fictional Javanese city of Halimunda is “filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels and on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and on the riverbanks, in the middle of bridges and under bushes. Most of them had been killed as they tried to escape.”
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw has inspired novels, an opera and several films - including The Innocents, which Pauline Kael called the best ghost movie she'd ever seen. How did he make such a simple story so chilling? By Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín
Saturday 3 June 2006
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n January 1895, whenHenry Jameswas in the depths of depression due to the failure of his play Guy Domville, the Archbishop of Canterbury told him the story that became The Turn of the Screw. James wrote in his notebook: "Note here the ghost story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury ... the story of the young children ... left to the care of servants in an old country house through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children ... The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon ... It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story to be told ... by an outside spectator, observer."
Megs Jenkins (Mrs Grose), Pamela Franklin (Flora) and Deborah Kerr as the governess in The Innocents.
James let the story ferment in his mind for more than two-and-a-half years before he set to work on it. For most of his career he was sadly aware that his books would never attract a large audience, but there were times when he directly and openly sought popularity. This was one of them. Through his friend William Dean Howells he had made contact with a new young editor at Collier's Magazine in the United States, to whom he sold the serial rights for his new story. He made The Turn of the Screw as frightening and dramatic as he could because he needed a new audience in America. So frightening, indeed, that he actually frightened himself. When he came to correct the proofs of the story, which was serialised over 12 issues in 1898, he told his friend Edmund Goose: "When I had finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid to go upstairs to bed."
In the final instalment of her series on the novel, Jane Smiley on why Toni Morrison’s Beloved - a sensational story of slavery and racism in America - has endured
t is clear from Morrison's dedication ("Sixty Million and more") that she intends to embrace the social document potential of the novel, as, indeed, any novel that treats injustice and its effects must do. This acceptance of the novel's power to shape opinion actually frees her to do anything she wants artistically - novelists who are careful to avoid social questions tend to limit their subjects to personal relationships or aesthetic questions that seem, on the surface, to be perennial, though in fact the novelist is usually simply avoiding the social and economic implications of what he or she is saying. For Morrison and most other writers of the 1980s, though, everything about the novel, from plot to style to characterisation, that had once seemed fairly neutral was seen to be fraught with political implications. Like Tolstoy, who also embraced the novel as a social document and openly used it to express his opinions, Morrison had a theory - a vision of slavery and black/white relations in America - that was in some ways old-fashioned, but still inflammatory and unresolved. The task was to remake the old story in a compelling way, and also to separate her own telling from that of earlier writers, especially Harriet Beecher Stowe.
From Toni Morrison’s desolate tale of slavery’s legacy to Alice Sebold’s vision of heaven, Louise Doughty selects the best books that defy disbelief
Louise Doughty Wed 28 Aug 2019 12.06 BST
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et’s start with the biggest problem for anyone writing a ghost story: does your ghost actually exist? Maybe there is going to be some other explanation: the person seeing the ghost is going mad, or being driven mad by someone else. Perhaps the ghost is a manifestation of grief, or being faked by a criminal who will be unmasked when you whip off the white sheet like Scooby-Doo? You can’t fudge this one.
It’s surprisingly hard not to make a narrator-ghost appear twee. The minute your ghost talks about whisking from one place to the next, or floating along a pavement, they sound like Casper. Suddenly, there are a lot of verbs that can only be employed with the greatest of caution. The very best ghost stories get you to suspend your disbelief because whatever the nature of their manifestation the rationale for that ghost existing is entirely convincing: here are some of them.
This great testament to the horrors of slavery opens with a haunting. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” In the Nobel prize-winning author’s most famous book, the ghost of a baby killed by her mother to save her from slavery is a malicious sprite but also a metaphor for the way in which the great evil of slavery haunts its victims after abolition, haunts the history of America and should haunt us all. To write it “was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts”, Morrison said, talking of the “the chaos of the needy dead”. When Morrison’s death was announced at the beginning of August, many commentators cited Beloved as one of the greatest novels of all time. If you haven’t read it yet, what’s wrong with you?
No list of ghost stories could exclude this Victorian classic set in a remote country house. A governess has care of a young boy and girl, two orphans, who she comes to believe can see the ghosts of a man and woman maliciously haunting the house. One of the intriguing aspects of reading this unresolved story is that, seen through modern eyes, its ambiguities offer themselves up as metaphors for child neglect and sexual abuse within the home.
Ghost stories from different nations provide a cultural barometer of sorts. Ghosts have a strong presence in Indonesian culture and the white tiger that inhabits this story is not only the phantom inside the young murderer Margio but also a literal tiger that can be seen by the villagers. This short, intense and beautiful book was selected for the Man Booker International longlist, making Kurniawan the first Indonesian author to be nominated. Is it really a ghost story? Who cares?
This award-winning non-fiction account of the 2011 tsunami that claimed tens of thousands of lives in Japan isn’t strictly a ghost story either, but it’s a stunning account of how the living are haunted by the need to reclaim their dead. Parry concentrates on the tragedy of Okawa primary school, which lost all but two of its children. Many of his descriptions will haunt you: for me, it was the bereaved parents training themselves to operate mechanical diggers so they could excavate silt and mud for the bodies of their children long after the official search had given up.
This polyphonic tale of multiple ghosts won the 2017 Man Booker prize – not bad considering it was Saunders’ first novel, although he was already a highly acclaimed short story writer. It concerns the grief of President Abraham Lincoln for his young son William and is an entertaining and heartbreaking reminder that grief afflicts the poor and the mighty in equal measure.
This wonderful adult novel from the author of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness proves what an endlessly inventive writer she is. It opens, like many another ghost story, with the discovery of a journal, in this case written by Jack, a wireless operator on an Arctic expedition that takes place in 1938 as the clouds of war are gathering in Europe. The group set up camp in a remote bay, but as the polar winter and endless night close in around them, they realise they are not alone …
Mawkish but affecting … Saoirse Ronan in the 2009 film version of The Lovely Bones. Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Rex
This story from the afterlife narrated by the ghost of a 14-year-old murder victim was an instant bestseller when it was published, and was made into a mawkish but still affecting film by Peter Jackson starring Saoirse Ronan. Susie Salmon watches from her own personal heaven as her family grieve and the police fail to catch her killer. In lesser hands it could have been sentimental but such is Sebold’s skill and observation that you go with the flow and are desperate for young Susie to find peace and justice for her family.
A doctor is called to Hundreds Hall, the dilapidated mansion belonging to the Ayres family. Have they simply fallen on hard times like so many aristocratic families of the postwar era, or is there something more sinister going on? Waters takes her intimate knowledge of Victorian gothic and combines it with all her usual skill to create something both knowingly traditional and utterly modern in its portrayal of family secrets and class.
One of the most famous modern ghost stories thanks to its hugely successful stage and film adaptations, Susan Hill’s novel has lost none of its shocking gothic power. Set in the sinister Eel Marsh House, cut off from the world entirely when the waters rise over its causeway, a solicitor called Arthur Kipps tries to unravel the affairs and deadly history of the house and its owner, the deceased Mrs Drablow. But the woman in black will haunt him forever.
Five narrators haunt this joyous and inventive book, beginning with the ghost of a young woman working as a chambermaid who dies after climbing into a dumb waiter on the fourth floor just to prove she could fit. The cord snaps and down she goes and her descent is an apt beginning for a novel that rushes headlong through an investigation of grief with a glorious shout of “Woooo-hoooo” (its opening phrase). This is a novel that proves that ghost stories can go anywhere and be anything: enchanting, poetic and even funny. It is truly the most malleable of forms.