Customer Reviews

Elegant nightmares: The English ghost story from Le Fanu to Blackwood

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I'm not sure why Jack Sullivan is listed as the editor of "Elegant Nightmares", since his book is an essay on the English ghost story from Sheridan Le Fanu to Algernon Blackwood, rather than an anthology. Sullivan concerns himself with the writers who can make you sick with horror, not sick to your stomach, and who accomplish their goal through indirection and suggestion, and brief glimpses of apparitions that will stay with you long after you've finished their stories.

Temporally speaking, Sullivan's chosen authors occupy the high ground between the decaying castles and mouldering crypts of the Gothic, and the gory surgeries of the modern horror tale. He spends most of his book with Le Fanu and M.R. James (as indeed, he must), but also makes room for L. P. Hartley ("The Travelling Grave"), H. R. Wakefield ("Old Man's Beard"), R. H. Malden ("The Thirteenth Tree"), and E. G. Swain ("The Stoneground Ghost Tales"), among others. M.R. James claimed to be a follower of Sheridan Le Fanu, and the authors who came after M.R. James claimed to be his follower, so there is a nice continuity to "Elegant Nightmares", and Sullivan exploits it to the fullest. Only his penultimate chapter on Algernon Blackwood strays a bit from the 'antiquarian' mold, but so did Blackwood's ghost stories.

If you treasure the 'old fashioned' ghost story, you should read Jack Sullivan's elegant book on the best (male) authors in this difficult genre. I subtracted one star from my rating only because he neglects the woman who were contemporaries of Le Fanu and Blackwood, and who populated the ghostly kingdom with very haunting stories of their own.