It's time for the annual installment of the LP's Halloween Horrorama! This year's theme: twenty years of horror, on either side of the twentieth-century divide. (For previous installments, see 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.)
- Grant Allen, "Wolverden Tower" (1896). A young woman finds herself caught up in a mystical pagan building rite. Later collected in Twelve Tales (1899). For more on Allen, see here.
- J. K. Bangs, "The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks" (1900). Comic short story about a man who runs into a ghost, with inadvertent consequences for a girl's boarding school...
- Ambrose Bierce, "The Damned Thing" (1898). At an inquest, a young writer explains how a hunting expedition went demonically haywire. To find out more about Bierce, best known today for The Devil's Dictionary, see The Ambrose Bierce Project and Don Swaim's Ambrose Bierce site.
- Willa Cather, "The Affair at Grover Station" (1900). A tale in the ghost story subgenre of dead men accusing their murderers. On Cather, see the Willa Cather Foundation and the Willa Cather Archive.
- Mary Cholmondeley, "Let Loose" (1890). Man explores crypt; bad stuff results. See Carolyn Oulton's Mary Cholmondeley site. (That's "Chumley," in case you're wondering.)
- F. Marion Crawford, "The Upper Berth" (1894). On a transatlantic voyage, a man slowly realizes that something is hanging out in the berth above him...and driving people to commit suicide. But what? There's a biographical sketch of Crawford at the Catholic Encyclopedia.
- Olivia Howard Dunbar, "Shell of Sense" (1908). A ghost story narrated by the ghost, watching her husband and sister.
- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "The Shadow on the Wall" (1903). Two brothers have words; one dies. And then, a strange shadow appears. A lifetime's supply of Freeman e-texts is available here.
- Lafcadio Hearn, "The Reconciliation" (1900). A samurai returns to the wife he divorced years previously, only to find that things have not, perhaps, quite remained the same. Adapted as the "Black Hair" chapter of the film Kwaidan (1964). More about Hearn here.
- Henry James, "The Altar of the Dead" (1895). A man builds a lavish shrine to his Dead, but the arrival of a fellow-worshipper eventually disturbs his understanding of what that means. Many more James e-texts at The Ladder.
- M. R. James, "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" (1904). As always in M. R. James, antiquarian research is a very risky business. The Thin Ghost has all the James you could possibly want.
- Rudyard Kipling, "The House Surgeon" (1907). Everyone who enters one bedroom in this home becomes exceptionally depressed. What's the secret? There's an overview of Kipling at the Victorian Web.
- S. Weir Mitchell, "The House beyond Prettymarsh" (1910). Two men take refuge in a deserted farmhouse, with the expected results. Mitchell was also a well-known doctor, notorious for the rest cure.
- Arthur Quiller-Couch, "The Seventh Man" (1900). Six men are shipwrecked in the Arctic. Or are there only six? Quiller-Couch may be better remembered under his pseudonym, Q.
- Bram Stoker, "The Judge's House" (1891). People do insist on (ahem) hanging out in the homes of deceased judges. Of course, we all know for what Stoker is most famous.
- Mark Twain, "A Ghost Story" (1903). Twain's hilarious send-up of the notorious Cardiff Giant hoax (and of the ghost story genre more generally). Visit the Mark Twain House.
- Edith Wharton, "Afterward" (1910). A woman slowly uncovers the mystery of her husband's disappearance. More of Wharton's ghost stories available via Literary Gothic; visit the Edith Wharton Society for more information.
- Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost" (1891). Wilde's classic comic story about a put-upon ghost trying to evict the Americans who have taken over his home. Go Wilde at the Victorian Web.
Oh, I should have invited you to be part of the roundup I put together for the Second Pass (http://thesecondpass.com/?p=7856)! Next time I'll know!
Posted by: Levi Stahl | November 02, 2011 at 03:44 PM