Thayer Berlyn's Blog - Posts Tagged "gothic"

By fortune, and in adoration of the atmospheric frames of Lord Dunsany, Guy De Maupassant, John Collier, Poe, Hawthorne, du Maurier, I have found a most marvelous old book.

The embossed, hardbound novel is entitled, Survival, and authored by Phyllis Bottome c. 1943...a story told from the perspective of a Viennese ghost and begins:

"A Great interest has always been taken in what living people think or feel about ghosts, but the other side of the picture has remained unpainted. We do not know what ghosts think or feel about living people.

Now I--Rudoph or, as people in Vienna used to call me, "Rudi" von Ritterhaus--am a ghost; and therefore what I think of these people who inhabit that small island off the coast of Europe called England--where I am doing my haunting at present--may be useful to my sometimes unwilling, and yet always kindly, hosts."

Authoring the Ghost Story:

Recently, I revisited Peter Penzoldt's, The Supernatural in Fiction, updated 1964, no less. In modern literary realm, the ghost story is in the least demand and yet, as Walter De la Mare once noted, the writing of one requires: "... a very special technique quite beyond the reach of the average concoctor of horrors."

If there is to be one rule, let this be the one: the ghost is in the psyche of the haunted character and often more a metaphor of the revenant than restless presence. Forget this, and you fail the concept, even given the room the ghost story holds unique in characterization from other genres in fiction. I suspect von Ritterhaus will fill the requirement quite perfectly.

Compelling film for the theme of the day: