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October 10, 2003
Halloween Lit By Tom Smith It's October and time for one of my favorite holidays, Halloween. It's fun and a lot less stressful than Christmas, which we Catholics celebrate with double Manhattans and . . . oh, don't get me started on Christmas. Turns out, I am your source for the best scary books of at least some literary merit. You can begin with this classic anthology, which was reviewed by Edmund Wilson back in the 1940's and sort of made this sort of fiction respectable for a while. A more contemporary collection is The Dark Descent, which contains a nice introduction to the various sub-genres and good lit crit analysis of the psychology of each (including interesting speculation on why some of best ghost/horror writers are lapsed Catholics). The ghost story reached its peak in Victorian and Edwardian England and one of the pleasures of the genre is its depictions of everyday English life in the period. The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories is a gem. This Oxford collection of Victorian Ghost Stories overlaps some, but is also pretty good. One of the very best writers of ghost stories was Edith Wharton, who of course wrote great novels as well. This collection of ghost stories includes "Afterward" considered by some the finest such story ever written. Anglophiles and folks who like stories with a scholarly angle will like M.R. James. If these stories catch you in the right mood, they can actually be pretty scary. A very different sort of writer is Algernon Blackwood, whom you will love or hate. His stories are often set in remote, wilderness locations, such as an island off the coast of Sweden, or in a marsh on the Danube. Take it on your next camping trip and terrify the kids! Ambrose Bierce was an American writer and by all accounts an extremely unpleasant man. Wrote pretty good stories, though. You may have read "An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" in your Junior High English class. All this bunch in this post are of pretty high literary quality. I used to read these stories to my kids until my mother-in-law made me stop. |