“The appeal of the conventional crime novel,” the Irish writer John Banville once suggested, “is the sense of completion it offers.” Unlike life, bounded by the unremembered and—strictly speaking—unlived experiences of birth and death, “in an Agatha Christie whodunit or a Robert Ludlum thriller, we know with a certainty … that when the murderer is unmasked or the conspiracy foiled, everything will click into place, like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself before our eyes.” Against this satisfaction, Banville proposed an alternative form of crime novel, one in which “if something can go wrong, it will”; for such stories, “it is the sense of awful and immediate reality that makes them so startling, so unsettling, and so convincing.”
My fellow interns were testing archaeology as a career path. My aims were less practical: I wanted to immerse myself in the people and places that I had been reading about all spring in my Southwestern Archaeology class. When our bosses explained that the Falls Creek Rock Shelter site had been excavated in the 1930s by Earl Morris, I gasped in delight: I recognized the name from my textbook. Real archaeologists had walked this ground, and here was I, following in their footsteps. I bent to pick up a bit of odd rock. “Is this a piece of pottery?” I asked my boss, an archaeological technician for the Forest Service.
As we drift into the season of mists, many of us may cosy up with a ghost story or two. But who are the best known authors behind the classics, who plied their chilling trade in the Victorian and Edwardian eras? There are the usual suspects: MR James, Charles Dickens, William Hope Hodgson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, Wilkie Collins. But what of Mary E Wilkins Freeman? Evelyn Henty? Olive Harper? Elinor Mordaunt? Lettice Galbraith? BM Croker?
That most of us won’t recognise these names is no accident: these women ghost-story writers were effectively erased from history over the last century. But thanks to the often painstaking detective work of a handful of dedicated anthologists, the balance is being restored in spooky tales.
Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of eight contemporary ghost stories, with the horror stemming from the irresistible power that technology has over us. In real life we are obsessed, distracted, impolite, floating through a world of unravelling human bonds and never-ending notifications. Could fiction be worse?
Then think of every song of love hurled at you & yours.
Recall how battered you were by sheer understanding
so that you might surrender. Not her being gone
Before glimpsing outlines of whorled branches,
you smell spruce needles, know gophers lie