• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1614 0

the ominously irrational sometimes went far beyond instilling simple fright and awe. During the heyday of the classic ghost story in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were plenty of sensationalistic (and ephemeral) writers whose contributions to the many fiction magazines were all about cheap, garish effects; but their efforts were counterweighed by more profound, psychologically penetrating tales from such major literary names as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, Mrs. Oliphant, and Ambrose Bierce—and many writing in languages other than English. These authors were not slumming in a superficial popular genre; they had quite serious intent. And they were joined in this by inspired specialists in the supernatural, some of whom remain well known today for their spooky brilliance: J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson. Henry and M. R. James (no relations), in their very different efforts like “The Turn of the Screw” and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” employed ghosts and other phantoms of the nocturnal hours to cast light on the interior of the human psyche; this was the collective goal. In the hands of all these practitioners, ghosts signified aspects of the mentalities of those still living: a man visiting a haunted house was in a real sense haunting it himself, witnessing apparitions that echoed the proceedings of his own subconscious. Just as the emerging discipline of psychiatry was beginning to probe the subtle, contradictory workings of the human brain, the Victorian and Edwardian canons of the ghostly were projecting upon the printed page flickering specters of our repressed desires and our most terrible impulses. The ghost, in the final analysis, is very often Us. And likewise the vampire, the werewolf, and the many further doppelgängers embodied in literary nightmares.

This approach continues in Ghosts by Gaslight, with many a fresh twist. Ghost stories are gothic fictions, in that their objective landscapes—old manor houses, creepy backwoods, art galleries where the portraits stare out more purposefully than usual—are also intensely subjective. When Laird Barron’s hunters range the monstrous Washington wilderness in homage to Algernon Blackwood’s menacing panoramas of haunted Nature, and when John Langan’s Henry-Jamesian protagonist ventures into far more settled but still eerie precincts back east, they are going home to themselves, to self-knowledge. Such knowledge can be utterly horrifying, merely disturbing, subtly discombobulating, quietly domestic, or even somewhat antic. But of whatever color, it is revealing of what we have not been able, or willing, to realize about ourselves. So the part of Ghosts by Gaslight that is ghostly is about its afflicted characters staring into the mirror, at their grave reflections, amidst cries of terror and looming shades of night.

But what of the gaslight, which can help to dispel the darkness? The “scientific romances” of Wells, Verne, and others anticipated future times—often very near futures—in which expanding frontiers of knowledge would deliver to humankind, or privileged sections of humankind, enormously increased power over Nature. These were Promethean fictions that expected the prodigious leaps of innovation already being experienced (from horse-drawn carts and carriages to widespread railways in just a generation! from cities of dangerous shadow to modern metropolises with brightly lit streets in just a few years! from crude telegraphy to radio in almost no time!) to continue, to the point where submarines would patrol effortlessly the greatest depths of the sea, airships would wander the skies with serene impunity, and the first spacecraft, propelled by giant cannon or miraculous Cavorite, would allow swift visits to the moon. Human beings would at last ascend beyond their cruel enslavement to the earth’s surface, the