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Beloved
- The ghost-story genre allows those silenced voices a say. Toni Morrison’s Beloved remains the best-known example of this, but it is by no means the only great work built around a ghost.
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Jan 5, 2022 · The ghost-story genre allows those silenced voices a say. Toni Morrison’s Beloved remains the best-known example of this, but it is by no means the only great work built around a ghost.
Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. Arguably the greatest ghost story writer in the history of the medium, M.R. James was extraordinarily adept at honing a sense of the uncanny in his tales ...
- The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. Louisiana teenager Rory Deveaux moves to London to attend boarding school for her senior year on the very same day that a Jack the Ripper-like murder rocks the city.
- The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco. Okiku is a lonely spirit, murdered 300 years ago by a man who threw her body into a well. She walks the earth freeing ghosts who were murdered like herself and taking terrifying revenge on their killers.
- Ghost Summer By Tananarive Due. Not all of the stories in this excellent collection involve ghosts, but the titular novella Ghost Summer is, in my mind, a perfect example of what a ghost story should be.
- Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill. Former rock star Jude Coyne is comfortable living out of the spotlight on his farm in upstate New York. He lives with his much younger goth girlfriend, his two beloved German Shepherds, and a creepy collection of ghoulish artifacts: the skull of a man whose head was trepanned to let the spirits out, a real hangman’s noose, and perhaps, most troubling of all, a snuff film.
1. ‘ Lost Hearts ’. This was only the second ghost story James wrote, but it remains one of his very best – as well as one of his most unsettling. It’s unusual in having not a donnish scholar or collector as its protagonist (a James staple) but a young orphan boy, Stephen, who is sent to stay with is cousin, an ageing recluse named Mr Abney.
- Rl Stevenson The Body-Snatcher
- WW Jacobs The Monkey's Paw
- Mr James O Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad
- Elisabeth Taylor Poor Girl
- Nikolai Gogol The Nose and The Overcoat
- Pg Wodehouse Honeysuckle Cottage
- Saki The Open Window
- Edith Wharton The Looking Glass
- Vladimir Nabokov The Visit to The Museum
- Henry James The Turn of The Screw
As beautifully written and atmospheric as you would expect from Stevenson, this tale set in mid-19th century Scotland is about the grave robbers who provided the gruesome materials for medical schools. A ferocious study in greed and ambition, it has the most chilling denouement of any ghost story.
If it's terror you want, this well-known story of a magical talisman is hard to beat – not to be read when alone at night. The moral is: Be careful what you wish for - and don't open the door at night.
MR James - not to be confused with Henry - was the greatest practitioner of traditional ghost stories, spine-chilling tales designed to be read by a dying fire in a darkened room after dinner. Many of his pieces take place in the flatlands of East Anglia and this is a particularly effective example, set on a haunted - and haunting - beach at night....
An exquisite vignette by one of the underrated writers of our time, Poor Girl explores the erotic possibilities of haunting. Disturbing, touching, and hard to forget, it tells the story of a governess - or is that two governesses? Taylor plays with time and character shifts so cleverly that the joins are hard to spot. She also alludes slyly to The ...
These two stories are as far as one could get from the standard ghost story – not at all frightening but very, very disturbing: wild surreal satires of 19th century Russian bureaucracy in which a nose and an overcoat take on lives of their own and wreak havoc. Gogol's crazy comedy has a logic of its own which has never been bettered.
Comedy is more frequent in ghost stories than you might expect. Sometimes it is gruesome; here the touch is light. When James Rodman, thriller writer, goes to live in the house left him by his aunt, a very different sort of novelist, he finds himself haunted, against his will, by the spirit of the place and start turning out romantic slush. Honeysu...
Another comedy, a very typical and brilliant vignette by Saki in which the ghosts are imaginary.The shortest ghost story I know: a miniature masterpiece of wit and narrative structure.
A gentle, perceptive story with a hard centre. Moral ambiguity was Wharton's speciality: here she tells the tale of a woman who tries to please her employer by claiming to be in touch with the old woman's long-dead lover. But are her motives what they seem to be? Wharton takes the central claim of spiritualism - that we can contact the dead - and u...
This is a piece of autobiography - an extraordinary tale in which the narrator is haunted by the ghost of an entire country. Even admirers of Nabokov may not know this one, which has only rarely been reprinted - surprisingly, given its extraordinary vision of pre-Revolutionary Russia
The Turn of the Screw has long been regarded, with justice, as the greatest of all ghost stories. James worked it up from a tale told him by the archbishop of Canterbury. Like The Looking Glass, a masterpiece of ambiguity, it purports to describe the haunting of two children by their old governess and her lover. But does it? The action is narrated ...
Oct 2, 2023 · Ghost Story Ideas. 1. The Weeping Lady: A young woman discovers a haunted house in her small town, filled with the sounds of a woman weeping. The tears are real. 2. The Halloween Specter: On Halloween night, a group of friends discovers an apparition that only appears when the moon is hidden. 3.
Oct 30, 2020 · Will Maclean, author of the unsettling new novel The Apparition Phase, selects the best ghost stories to read at Halloween, including writing from the queen of screams Shirley Jackson, and a four-page, pitch-black nightmare that might just be the perfect ghost story.