The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

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There are only about thirty or forty first-class ghost stories in the whole of western literature.

The ghost story must be distinguished from the scientific extravaganza on its left, and from the horror story on its right. The writing of science fiction demands primarily the scientific aptitude for imagining the unrealised implications of a known phenomenon. Its composition is akin to the making of an actual scientific discovery, and it is well known that many of the scientific developments first promulgated as fiction, all too soon become fact. The horror story is purely sadistic; it depends entirely upon power to shock. To-day, of course, de Sade has defenders in high places, such as Madame Simone de Beauvoir; and existentialism contends that life itself is properly to be seen as a sequence of minute-to-minute shocks, inducing “nausea” and “vertigo”. The ghost story, however, seems to derive its power from what is most deep and most permanent. It is allied to poetry.

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