Anatomy of a Ghost Story
I’ve been trying to catch up on horror as a genre. I thought I didn’t much care for horror until recently—a pretty hilarious mistake in my self-conception, given that there were a couple years in my teens where I literally only read Stephen King. Shirley Jackson was the first nail unstuck from the coffin. I picked up We Have Always Lived In the Castle a couple years ago for a somewhat embarrassing reason: Sebastian Stan was starring in a film adaptation and I wanted to appraise the story before the interference of my favourite hairstyle tainted my objectivity. A happy side-effect was that I learned what horror was capable of: its scope, its impact, the different forms that ghosts can take.
Since then I’ve been gobbling up horror on the regular. Films like The VVitch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers), Hereditary (2018, dir. Ari Aster), and Us (2019, dir. Jordan Peele) brought me around to the visual medium of horror. Podcasts like The Magnus Archives gave me a sharp appreciation of the slow, sinking dread long-form horror can produce.
I’ve found a consistent literary canon a little harder to pin down. There are some authors I simply won’t read, like Lovecraft; enough people have improved upon and subverted his canon (N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, e.g.) that I don’t especially feel that I need to. I find myself returning to the same authors in horror I know will please me: Shirley Jackson, Stephen King. When I do branch out, I am often disappointed by what I perceive as a relatively flat approach to the genre.
I’m not especially attracted to horror for the thrill. I am far more interested in the deeper questions of humanity that horror can bring to the fore: How does one survive grief, trauma, terror? What of love in the face of it? Stalked by death, how and on what basis do we balance life?
Ghost stories can be especially good at dealing with these themes. Earlier this year I read a great anthology of ghost stories: Ghostly, ed. Audrey Niffenegger, dealing with many of these deeper themes. As with any anthology, not all the stories landed with me—I skipped Kipling out of self-preservation; others dealt with violence against women. But others dealt so well with the human condition that I was reminded what I look for in the genre.
In A.M. Burrage’s “Playmates,” a withdrawn girl is coaxed out of her shell only upon being sent to live with her guardian, a man living in an abandoned orphanage, where several ghosts of children still remain. A.S. Byatt’s “The July Ghost” handles the grief inherent in the passing of a child. Edith Warton’s “Pomegranate Seed” features a caring couple trying to navigate a new normal: a widower and his second wife deal with the arrival of occasional letters from his late first wife. And in “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions and “Honeysuckle Cottage” by P.G. Wodehouse, writers are driven gently insane by the house the inhabit: one by a woman contrived to ‘marry’ him, and the other by his aunt, a deceased romance novelist, who keeps compelling him to romantic tropes.
Each of these handles the presence of ghosts differently for their human perceivers. Some have manifested from grief, as is often typical in ghost stories, while others drive unsuspecting occupants insane. But the story of the bunch that’s most stuck with me is Burrage’s “Playmates”—where ghosts became friends to a friendless girl, bringing her to smile often when she never did before.
Ghosts are a particular fascination of mine. They are often treated as cliché; I think that’s because it’s easy to do them one-dimensionally. It can be more difficult to get into what they represent while foregrounding suspense or the horrific: they are facsimiles of humanity, manifestations in response to an absence, sometimes shadows of ourselves.
The Haunting of Hill House, both the book and the Netflix adaptation, does a ghost story well. It is often unclear whether there is really a ghost or if the mortals are the problem. It reminds me of episode 027 of The Magnus Archives (“A Sturdy Lock”), in which a man believes he is being haunted by his dead wife. Much later in the series, it is revealed he was being hunted by The Distortion, an entity specializing in madness. Ghosts are transparent, translucent, often proxies, hard to concretely see, identify, or name. They are at their most effective when they are misunderstood—as fear, grief, loneliness, and insanity often are.
Oddly, my best experience of a ghost story this year came in the form of a literary novel: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. The Glass Hotel is a serpentine tale told across many years and many spaces, originating on a small island in British Columbia and moving through several lives in New York before ending on a seabound ship.
The Glass Hotel heavily features themes that also appear in ghost stories: memory and regret, home and belonging, the drive for answers. The book begins with the main characters gathered one night in a glass hotel. Anyone who has spent a lot of time in glass-heavy architecture knows it is reflective in the dark, especially in the Pacific Northwest, backdropped against all those trees. Perhaps struck by their reflections, the characters all significantly change their lives.
The protagonist, Vincent, leaves her job with the owner of the hotel to live with him as his pretend spouse in New York. Her central hobby is as a videographer; she is often positioned as an observer, the camera a buffer between herself and the world. She is a ghost in this life, only partially actualized, often looking at her reflection and seeing someone only halfway living. After she leaves the hotel owner, she keeps encountering shadows of her previous life—only they never quite acknowledge her, as though she had never been part of it at all.
Vincent finds happiness in a transient life at sea and an always-choppy reflection. It’s a far cry from the smooth world of glass where she began. That she still looks at the world through a lens is her downfall. That she, Jonathan, and Paul all spend the book haunted by memories and regrets is central to the narrative—yet it could be that all they’re seeing is what they saw in the very beginning: their reflections in the glass. Those inchoate shadows follow them, force them to reckon with their pasts. In this way, the characters may serve as their own ghosts: they can’t, after all, escape what they see when they catch their own reflections.
All this serves to ask: What makes a good ghost story? Presence of a ghost doesn’t guarantee it. Personally, I’m no longer sure a ghost is even required.