Books: Haunting Season

THE WEEK END BOOK OF GHOST STORIES (280 pp.)—Edited by Hereward Car-rington—Washburn ($3.50).

The old clock still ticks in the passage, the moonlight still shapes a white pool on the floor, a gust of icy wind still shakes the old house—but, often enough nowadays, the ghost that comes stalking is fresh from a textbook of modern psychiatry. Such old props as bleeding heads tucked under skeletonic elbows, or crimson stab wounds on vaporous bodies, are out of fashion. “Many modern ghosts,” observes Editor Carrington in The Week End Book of Ghost Stories, “have become more human.”

Freud and his busy followers have had their effect. As Editor Carrington notes, modern man is far more terrified by a spooky representation of “the state of [his] own mind” than by any problem that may be on the ghost’s mind. Moreover, abstract art and surrealism seem to have made an impression on ghost fashions; e.g., some current phantoms do not bother to represent anything at all but simply join the victim in bed on a dark night, remaining strictly intangible and indefinable. The advance-guard ghosts in this collection include one which appears simply as a spot of green slime and goes “drip, drip, drip” on the sleeper’s face, and another which disguises itself as a strip of wet fur.

But the collection shows that it takes more than furry ectoplasm to make a first-class story. Good as the day it was written (1902) is W. W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s

Paw, in which the spook that hurls itself against the door, knocking piteously to be let in, is neither seen nor described but is known to the reader to be a cadaver which was last observed being crunched in the innards of a factory machine. Light as a feather, and funny, is John Collier’s The Bottle Party, which is not ghostly at all but deals with the imps which lie imprisoned in bottles crying, “Let me out! Do let me out! . . . I’m harmless. Please let me out!”

Top of the bill are Algernon Black-wood’s A Physical Invasion and Theophile Gautier’s Clarimonde. In the Blackwood story, a professional humorist takes a drug which he hopes will increase his sense of humor. It does, but it also invites a visit by a female “Intruder” who turns all his best jokes into “diabolical ideas of evil and tragedy.”

Gautier’s classic Clarimonde (first published in 1888) could pass for an up-to-date case history of psychological spookery but for the fact that it is drenched with old-fashioned ideas. A young seminarist is bowed before the altar, taking his priestly vows, when he glimpses a green-eyed courtesan of “supernatural beauty.” Thenceforth, his life takes on a Jekyll-and-Hyde cast: by day he is a humble village priest, by night “the Lord Romuald,” lover of Clarimonde, living in an Italian palace amid such pomp and splendor that “I do not believe that since Satan fell from heaven, any creature was ever prouder or more insolent.” Clarimonde, however, has the old ghost-story habit of sucking the blood from her lover’s arm so as to keep herself “alive.” This allows the distressed hero to come right out with an old-fashioned moral for the clergy: “Never gaze upon a woman, and walk abroad only with eyes fixed upon the ground; for . . . the error of a single moment is enough to make one lose eternity.”