The Contemporary Ghost Story

Do ghosts haunt your mind? Perhaps they are the ghosts of past mistakes, waiting to rise from unconscious darkness into the horror of full awareness. They may be the ghosts of past relationships, those “It might have been….” “I wish it had been….” Or “What if it had been… questions that are guests of near-photographic memories flooding consciousness at the most unexpected moments. Perhaps you have experienced a classic ghost, the spirit of a person who has died. All these subjects have been treated in the contemporary ghost story.

The classic ghost story of the nineteenth century was about the return of a spirit of a dead person, perhaps vengeful, perhaps not, but the goal is to create in the reader a sense of the uncanny, the mysterious, a fear that brings chills that continue long after someone finishes reading a story. One of the classics is M. R. James’s “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, my Lad,” quoting a haunting line from Robert Burns, the Scottish poet. If you have not read the story, I hope you do. I will not give away the plot, but like most James stories, the tension builds slowly and a chill grows until the reader experiences a feeling somewhat like Rudolf Otto’s notion of mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “mysterious, tremendous, yet fascinating.” The feeling is more like a creepy sense of awe, though it is mixed in with a good deal of old-fashioned fear. The traditional story has continued in contemporary fiction; a contemporary master of the traditional ghost story was Russell Kirk (1918-1994) in his fine collection, Ancestral Shadows (ISI, 2004). His stories left me with more of a feeling of awe that James’s, and that says a lot. One must include Peter Straub’s fine 1979 novel, Ghost Story.

Although traditional ghost stories are still being written, they usually have to have a unique twist to avoid repeating the same plot line and themes of earlier stories too closely. Many contemporary ghost stories focus on psychological forces that haunt us—tragic errors, personality flaws, mental health issues, living people who continue to haunt, sometimes in negative ways. The “ghost” might be memories of abuse or memories of a first kiss full of promise of happiness that led to heartache. A ghost might be a hallucination produced by the mind alone based on nothing that is externally real. It might be the return of a deadly temper suppressed for many years that explodes into murder and mayhem. The psychological sophistication of contemporary ghost stories is significantly greater than those written in the past (except for, perhaps, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw). Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House leaves it an open question whether the ghosts are objectively real or the psychological horrors of the protagonist. The stories in Joe Hill’s 20^th Century Ghosts mainly concern psychological ghosts rather than “dead people ghosts.” A masterpiece of stories regarding psychological ghosts is Mort Castle’s Knowing When to Die: Uncollected Stories (Independent Legions Publishing, 2018), which is literary horror of the highest order. Since my bias is toward the supernatural ghost story, I was not a fan of the collections of psychological ghost stories I had read before I read Castle’s book. I am a fan of this collection; it is excellent.

I still prefer the supernatural ghost story (“dead people ghosts”), but I am more open than before to non-supernatural, psychological ghost stories if they result in a similar mysterium tremendum feeling I have when reading good supernatural ghost stories. Reading both kinds is essential for any writer of ghost stories today.

Should Horror End in Hope?

Traditionally, horror stories had hopeful endings. This, in part, was the result of writers, whether they were religious or nonreligious, sharing a generally Christian culture. If Bram Stoker had ended Dracula with the vampire winning, with evil triumphing over good, his book would not have become a best seller in 1897. As Christianity faded from Western Culture, horror grew increasingly pessimistic, especially after the vast societial changes that occurred in Europe and the United States from 1964 on. Two of the best literary horror novels written, Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1971) and Harvest Home (1973) ended with evil triumphing over good. I can remember as a teenager watching the movie based on Harvest Home entitled The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978). Of course Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery” (1948) is a similar story and a precursor to the more pessimistic horror stories to come. The movie upset me as much as “The Lottery” did when I read it in junior high school. It did not seem right that evil would win. Of course H. P. Lovecraft’s stories from the early twentieth century are nihilistic in a way, but they are good at revealing a world without purpose and deity, subject to the arbitrary whims of the mindless god Azathoth and the other “gods.”

Although Stephen King’s work is generally hopeful and optimistic at the end of his books, the change from the ending of King’s story, “The Fog,” into the ending of the recent movie reveals, in part, a change in the culture of horror. Books and movies with hopeful endings are still being written, but some horror, such as the Splatterpunk movement of the 1980s, comes across as nihilistic rebellion against order in general. At least the characters in Lovecraft’s fiction believe in fighting against the chaos they find. The Nightmare on Elm Street series along with the Halloween series, has Freddy and Jason being resurrected time and time again as if they are undefeatable. To me, this is not a good thing—it is not the same as J.R.R. Tolkien’s saying that evil always reappears in other forms over time for Tolkien has ultimate hope that one day evil with be totally conquered.

I do not mind if children read or watch horror per se; children love to get scared. What is hurtful is when a horror story or movie leaves them without hope. However, there is a way that some adults can get something useful from nihilistic horror—they can see the results of a godless universe. Rather than parroting the atheistic existentialist’s manta about finding one’s own meaning in a universe without God, nihilistic horror spits in the face of that view, recognizing it as a cop-out, a denial of reality. Thus religious people can watch and learn from nihilistic horror how a totally matter-energy based universe leads to meaninglessness, violence, and despair. However, when others read such books and watch such movies, they may think that nihilism is the correct view of reality—and behave accordingly.

Nihilistic horror is a logical development from the loss of Christianity among writers and others in the intellectual and artistic classes. It still does not appeal to most Americans who watch movies, as the ending to the movie The Fog killed any chance of it being a financial success in the United States. Japanese horror, such as the Ring series and the Grudge series, is not nihilistic since the bad things that happen have a purpose in the Buddhist karmic system. Neither is the Saw series since the motive for killing is moral desert—the victims deserve what happens to them. Cormac McCarthy’s works sometimes border on nihilism, especially Child of God and perhaps Blood Meridian, but in the end his characters are searching for a truth in their lives that they find elusive. No Country for Old Men reflects the point of view of a sheriff who sees the rise of psychopathic violence that he attributes to the loss of traditional values. However, violence and destruction for no reason at all other than to shock the reader or viewer does reflect a nihilistic world view.

This does not mean that everyone should avoid nihilistic books or movies; not only can educated Christians learn from them, but also writers of all religious backgrounds or none. Thomas Tryon is a master of prose. Clive Barker writes a variety of work, not all nihilistic, and his fiction has a literary flare arising from Barker’s love of the King James Bible and classic literature. The horror elements in some of these books are useful, and the writer should always seek new ways or variations on older ways of creating suspense and a sense of dread.

The writer of horror who prefers hopeful endings should avoid the ending coming across as contrived. That is an easy mistake to make. The ending should flow logically and naturally from the overall story while still having an element of surprise in the climax and denouement. Stephen King’s early work and Dean Koontz’s horror works are good models to follow.

Personally I will not write a horror novel with an unhappy ending unless I am trying to illustrate what a world without God will look like, as I did in my short story, “Earnest Expectations,” about a man who gets an unpleasant surprise about the ultimate nature of the afterlife. H. P. Lovecraft was a model for that story. In my novels, focusing as they do on the battle between good and evil, I cannot in good conscience as a Christian end them by leaving the reader without hope. What Tolkien labeled the “eucatastrophe” (“good catastrophe”) of Christianity and a good story is what I am trying to capture, and I pray that thus far I have done that well and will do so in any future work.