Today I finished Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. The title is a bit deceptive. Roald Dahl didn't write any of the stories. He selected them.
However, he certainly put a lot of work into that selection. According to his introduction, he read 749 ghost stories to select the fourteen he considered the best. (He was actually doing this for a TV series that never got made.) Dahl was pretty scathing about most of the stories he rejected, including those (he says) written by famous writers. However, he also candidly admits that he was never able to write a good ghost story himself.
(I think his introduction might have influenced my recent blog post about ever-receding excellence, without my even realizing it. You'd think this group of stories would be all gold, right?)
1) "W.S." by L.P. Hartley. This is one of the best of the bunch. A very efficient little tale about an author who starts getting mysterious fan letters from someone who only uses the signature W.S. The locations from which the person is writing get closer and closer... 4/5.
I really liked The Go-Between. This is only the second Hartley work I've read..
2) "Harry" by Rosemary Timperley. This was fairly good. A ghost story about a child's imaginary friend. 3/5.
3) "The Corner Shop" by Lady Cynthia Asquith. This was one of my favourite stories in the book, perhaps because I'm a sucker for tales about mysterious shops. A typical English ghost story protagonist, a young barrister, comes across a rather cosy curiosity shop run by two friendly sisters. His next experience of the shop is very different. 4/5
4) "In the Tube" by Robert Benson. This story started excellently, with one character telling another the story of a mysterious experience he had, while a storm rages outside. I love stories within stories. However, the denouement rather over-eggs the pudding. 3/5.
4) "Christmas Meeting" by Rosemary Timperley. A woman alone in a hotel over Christmas has a strange encounter with a young man. This was such a slight affair that it's hard to even call it a story. Nor was there any shudder involved, although Dahl claimed that a shudder was what he was mostly looking for in a ghost story. 2/5.
5) "Elias and the Draug" by Jonas Lie. I can't rate this story as I skipped it after a couiple of pages. It's something to do with a Norwegian fisherman trying to harpoon a seal. I'm an incredibly insular person when it comes to fiction, and especially ghost stories. Norwegian fishing stories don't really float my boat (pun intended) when I'm looking for a spooky tale.
6) "Playmates" by A.M. Burrage. Excellent and rather moving story about an intellectual who decides to adopt an acquaintance's orphaned daughter, mostly to put his theories of parenthood to the test. They move to a remote country house and she starts to play with (apparently) imaginary friends. It was too long, but excellent apart from that. 4/5
7) "Ringing the Changes" by Robert Aickman. I've always regarded Aickman with great suspicion, because he's a "literary" horror writer. However, this was a gripping tale, and the stand-out of the whole volume. A honeymooning couple visit a seaside town where all the churchbells are ringing all day long. The only other guest at their hotel warns them to leave before nightfall, but do they? Well, what do you think? 5/5.
8) "The Telephone" by Mary Treadgold. Telephones can be used to great effect in horror stories, but this isn't an example of that. A young woman gets involved with an older man who's already married. The first wife does away with herself, but then the couple start getting mysterious phone calls. It's a promising plot, but it's developed in a way that's completely devoid of tension. 1/5
9) "The Ghost of a Hand" by Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu was a master of the spooky tale, but this is a rather silly and throwaway sort of story. It's all in the title, really. 2/5.
10) "The Sweeper" by A.M. Burrage. This is a very effective and chilling tale, even though there's absolutely nothing original or surprising about it. A young woman in domestic service wonders why her very elderly mistress is so freaked out by the sound of someone sweeping leaves in the garden at night. 4/5
11) "Afterward" by Edith Wharton. This might be the second best story in the collection. It has a rather unpromising start, but becomes genuinely disturbing as it moves towards the climax. The central idea (as the title suggests) is that, if you do meet a ghost, you might not realize it's a ghost until long afterward. 4/5
12) "On the Brighton Road" by Richard Barnham Middleton. A very short story with a tramp as a protagonist. While I think there should be more stories featuring homeless characters, it inevitably lacks the cosy element that I generally look for in tales of the phantasmal. And really there's not much to it. 1/5
13) "The Upper Berth" by Francis Marion Crawford. Apparently Crawford was a Catholic convert, which is interesting in itself. But I gave up on this story after a few pages. The whimsical, ironic tone grated on me. Of course, humour isn't fatal to a ghost story, but I think it should be applied sparingly. No rating.
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