leaving the ghostly young women heartbroken, and
ever after that the turnips grown in that field have
a distinct flavor of rum.
Ghost stories in the early 20th century were
very serious things, and it was a rare writer who
dared poke fun at the convention. Today one is
more likely to find ghosts amusing than terrifying,
and humorous renditions such as Topper(1926) by
Thorne SMITH and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(1968) by Alice Denham, both of which became
movies, are common. Most of Middleton’s fantasy
fiction can be found in The Ghost Ship and Other
Stories(1912).
Ghost StoryPeter Straub(1979)
Ghost stories have probably existed since people
first began telling tales around a fire. Unlike most
horror themes, ghosts have been used by a variety
of authors who might not otherwise be associated
with the genre. There are ghosts in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, for example. Henry James gave us THE
TURN OF THE SCREW(1898), and Edith Wharton
wrote a number of ghost stories, as did Charles
Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. There
are ghosts in haunted houses, although not all
haunted house stories are, strictly speaking, ghost
stories, and they can be found in cemeteries, at the
scenes of their deaths, or attached to physical ob-
jects. Ghosts come in many forms, usually insub-
stantial though sometimes capable of moving solid
objects and even in a few cases physically mani-
fested and palpable. Some ghosts are friendly, some
comical, some neutral, and others positively
malevolent.
Most tales of ghosts are short stories, and
when they appear in novels their presence is often
a peripheral issue or a plot device, part of the set-
ting rather than separate characters. With the pos-
sible exception of The Turn of the Screwby James or
THE BECKONING FAIR ONE by Oliver ONIONS,
there is no single ghost story that stands out signif-
icantly from among the rest because to a large ex-
tent the stories follow a very similar formula. Peter
STRAUB, who had written interesting but relatively
minor supernatural fiction previously, would create
in his long novel Ghost Storya crystallization of the
form with a contemporary setting. Like many ghost
stories, the novel is about revenge, but the fashion
in which the revenge is worked out is unique and
frighteningly effective.
As young men, a group of friends become in-
volved with a rather controversial young woman.
Internal tensions among them, caused by her flirta-
tions, eventually lead to open conflict, during
which she is injured. Believing her to be dead, they
conspire to conceal her death by driving her car
into a lake, discovering only when it is too late
that she was still alive. They swear an oath of se-
crecy to which they adhere for many years, but
eventually she returns, wreaking her vengeance on
them and their children. Unlike most ghosts, she
can physically interact with the world, walks about
in daylight, and can change her appearance. The
novel is relentlessly suspenseful and written in a
refreshingly intelligent and witty prose style. No
other writer has produced a similar story to rival it.
A fairly faithful film version was made in 1981.“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”Fritz Leiber
(1949)
The standard clichés of early horror fiction were
creepy castles, graveyards, foggy streets, and loca-
tions whose strangeness and unfamiliarity were de-
signed to heighten the sense of uneasiness. Fritz
LEIBERhad a very different viewpoint. He thought
that supernatural events would be even more un-
settling if they occurred in familiar settings, and he
proved it with numerous stories including Conjure
Wife(1935), with its depiction of witchcraft in a
contemporary urban academic setting, “SMOKE
GHOST” (1941), which makes use of an industrial
background, and this story, which blends a form of
vampirism with advertising and photography.
Leiber’s unnamed girl is a fashion model who
takes the world by storm. The public is fascinated
by her image, particularly her unusual eyes, but
strangely uninterested in her background. No one
knows who she is, and only the two photographers
who have used her as a model have ever seen her
in person. Although she appears in a number of
photographs, her image has never been drawn or
painted, she has never appeared on television or
radio, and her background is a complete mystery.
The narrator was the first to take her picture, and132 Ghost Story