Anyway, this piece was originally called Ghostly Stories.
If you visit your local bookstore, or browse online, and look at the
titles in the horror/paranormal section, what do you see?
Vampires.
Zombies.
Vampires.
Werewolves.
Vampires.
Cthulhu.
Zombies.
Vampires.
All well and good, but the current vogue for such fleshy, corporeal monsters leaves readers and
writers in want of what is, for me, the mother-lode of supernatural fiction:
the ghost story. The term was a virtual synonym for horror stories once, when
MR James & Co. were scaring each other around coal fires of a Christmas.
Never mind that not all James's stories actually featured ghosts - maybe ghostly stories would be a better
description.
What I mean by 'ghostly' is a certain level of ambiguity about the
proceedings, a doubt on the part of the reader about what is or isn't
objectively true at the level of the story. There's an obvious example here,
but obvious due in part to its greatness, so I'll just say it: The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James. (The
name 'James' obviously being a sign of a great ghost story writer, heh heh).
Hundreds of thousands of words have probably been written arguing that the
ghosts in the book are a product of the governess's imagination, and hundreds
of thousands probably written arguing for the opposite point that the ghosts
are real.
All of them miss the point. A novel like The Turn Of The Screw (and most novels, to an extent) can be
compared to one of those pictures that looks like an old woman or a young woman
depending on how you look at it:
Arguing about whether this image is really
a picture of an old or young woman is besides the point, despite the evidence
that can be mustered either way. The whole point is that it as an image of
both, and the whole point of The Turn Of
The Screw is that the uncertainty about what is real is what creates the
doubt, creates the unease. I think that, as a species, we instinctively want to
determine whether something we hear or read is true or not, and we try and do
this to fiction too. Even though we know it's all untrue we want to know what
is real in the context of the story.
And I believe the failure to do so disturbs us at some fundamental,
subconscious level. Which is perhaps why some critics are so vehement that, no,
the ghosts the governess sees are
real, or aren't (it is a picture of
an old woman, and I have a hundred thousand words of proof!)
I think this ambiguity about what is literally real in the context of
the story runs through much great horror fiction, possibly without the authors
always being aware of its presence. I'd bet that out of any genre horror
fiction has the greatest percentage of unreliable narrators - the mad, the
delusional, the dead. Lovecraft's twisted geometries and vagaries of
description work in the same way, I think - the reader finds it hard to
visualise what is actually being described, which creates its own ambiguity.
Shirley Jackson, in stories like The Visit
and The Summer People, was a genius
and knowing what to miss out of a
story to make it scary. Robert Aickman's self-called 'strange stories' work in
a similar way - despite all the details that seem significant, they refuse to
cohere into something easily understandable and digestible. Contemporary
writers like Robert Shearman, Cate Gardner
and Dennis Etchison seem to me to be doing similar things, in their own
differing ways.
And the ghost, of the all the traditional horror monsters, is ideally
suited to this kind of ambiguous story. Of course it can be done with the more
trendy, physical monsters that current bedevil our horror fiction, but it's
harder - how many times have you wanted to shout at the characters in a vampire
novel that of course the vampires are
real, why else has half the town got holes in their necks? The characters might
be unsure of the reality or otherwise of the vampire, but the reader rarely is - bloodsuckers are all
too obvious for that, usually.
Like most horror authors, I've dabbled with zombies, I've dallied with
vampires and werewolves. But for me, the truly scary monster is the one that I
just saw out of the corner of my eye, and that I might have imagined anyway -
the ghost.
