The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories

...Edith Wharton has bequeathed "Bewitched," a chilling portrait of a New England farm community whose bleak social rituals are almost more forbidding than the local specter's seductions...

...Part of the problem may be that literary ghosts in general deign to make only fleeting appearances...

...After fifteen years in advertising, to his own mind, he is dead already: "when death occurs, it isn't just the body that goes...

...In L. P. Hartley's succinct parable "Night-Fears," a night watchman is haunted to death by anxiety not-quite-incarnate...

...But it also seems that nostalgia is getting in the way of fresh ideas...

...This idiosyncrasy may explain why ghost stories outnumber ghost novels, and why writers might not bother exposing their apparitions to fullblown human beings...

...Lieber's tormented businessman asks his secretary: Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like?...A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns....It would reflect the tangled, sordid, vicious things...

...ghosts are carrying too much baggage...

...This is not to say that the volume lacks any interesting stories...

...This story is successful particularly because the personality of the narrator-who watches indifferently as his wife abandons him- is more unnerving than the ghosts...

...much baggage...

...All the loose ends...

...Even when .they commit themselves to a long-term haunting, they like to pry the haunted loose from the world-"sucking the life clean out of him," as a character observes of Wharton's "bewitched" farmer-so that the victim too, in a way, can only be glimpsed...

...But very few of them seem to care-or even notice-that they've reached the modern era, and their lack of enthusiasm is infectious...

...The "Smoke Ghost"-which haunts deserted office buildings and preys on weary commuters-does fit these modern criteria, but many of his colleagues in this volume might have been dislodged from nineteenth-century gothic estates, and their comportment-rearranging household furniture, for example-seems perfunctory and unsurprising...

...Celia Wren The twentieth century doesn't seem to have done much for the ghost story...

...And it would be very grimy...

...But in too many of the other stories ghosts seem to act as magnets for flat characters with made-to-order inheritances-for example, in Walter de la Mare's "The Quincunx,"-and generic family problems-as in Fay Weldon's "Watching Me, Watching You...

...Despite the earnest intentions of writers like Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and A. S. Byatt, the atmosphere in these thirty-three tales remains disappointingly flat...

...In the early nineteenth century Samuel Coleridge distinguished between the creative dynamism he termed "imagination" and derivative "fancy," which "must receive all its materials ready-made from the law of association...

...In "The Cheery Soul," Elizabeth Bowen's atmospheric spy story set in World War II Britain, a bemused house guest follows a ghost-strewn trail of pranks and arch messages like, "Look in the fish kettle...

...Tradition can be soothing, of course, and maybe literary ghosts have shouldered the burden of being comfortable instead of horrific...

...Fitzgerald's offering does feature an unusually sleazy ghost who picks up women on trains, but this figure is surrounded by cut-out Fitzgerald jaded youths...

...The stories here seem too much works of fancy, rather than imagination...

...These days the denizens of science fiction and horror novels, including the ubiquitous vampires, may be racking up countless frequent-flier miles posting over the landscape of human unease...

...And in what may be the best of the entries, William Trevor's "The Only Story," a disillusioned advertising writer allows a houseful of phantoms to tempt him to suicide...

...In his introduction, Douglas Cox, the editor of this anthology, vindicates the modern ghost, citing a passage from one of the book's more successful stories, Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost...

...According to the law of association, they cobble together traditional ghosts and the traditional props of ghosts, such as decaying houses, sinister towers, prim drawing rooms, and bloody footprints...

...Ghosts skip rope, commit murder, have sex, eat Mars bars, shop at flea markets, boat up canals, and take up the autobiographical pen...