The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Начало книги

In my Introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, I tried to define what seem to me to be the basic facts about the genre. I pointed out that the ghost story must be distinguished both from the mere horror story and from the scientific extravaganza. I suggested that the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry; that it need offer neither logic nor moral; that it is an art form of altogether exceptional delicacy and subtlety; and that, not surprisingly, there are only about thirty or forty first-class specimens in the whole of western literature.

The ghost story is mainly a late romantic form, most of the best examples having been written at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the interest in and demand for ghost stories has never been greater than now. This is a not uncommon contemporary situation: today’s mass audiences for nineteenth century music, coming again and again to hear the same works, would have flabbergasted the impecunious and often slighted composers. Critics rail at the public indifference to music in new forms, but the only likely result is a diminution in musical interest altogether. For there is real doubt whether the romantic composers have successors of remotely comparable quality; and a strong probability that the new forms of society are responsible. A world in which everything is officially susceptible to reason, and also capable of improvement, is not a good world for writing new ghost stories either. It is only to be expected that the most distinguished living practitioner represented in the present volume, Miss Bowen, was long and exceptionally linked with a shadowy castle in Ireland.

Читать дальше →