Fearsome Five: Five Great Ghost Stories

I’ve always enjoyed a good ghost story. However, some critics argue that ghost stories, like many horror stories, are inherently formulaic: the protagonist enters the spooky house/mansion/castle, they witness strange happenings, not believing them at first, until ultimately being forced to believe. But the ghost story is more than just an excuse to describe scary noises and raised hackles. The ghost story, at its best, gives us a glimpse into the character’s guilty conscience (how many ghosts are, in fact, looking for revenge?) or leaves us with questions about our own mortality. Here are five ghost stories that do a great deal with that formula, enough to go beyond it. 

5) Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay

Elizabeth Sanderson, a single mother, faces one of her greatest fears: the disappearance of her son Tommy. Police are searching for him. Her mother is trying her best to support her. Her daughter Kate is acting out. Angry comments are being left of her social media page. Paul Tremblay does a great job of displaying a mother desperately trying to keep going, despite the police turning up no leads and the journal pages she discovers show her that she may not have known her child as well as she thought. She doesn’t show the skepticism many characters in ghost stories do; the possible ghost of her son is another connection, besides his journal pages, that she can latch on to.

Along with the appearance of this specter, there are also many other social dynamics at play, from the mother reminiscing about her troubled ex-husband, to Kate wondering what has happened to her brother, to Tommy’s friends who may have something to hide. What made this story so memorable to me is that the supernatural part is almost unnecessary for me to enjoy it; simply watching a compelling mystery unfold and how the characters deal with their own grief and feelings of responsibility was enough.

4) HEX by ThomasOlde Heuvelt

The residents of Black Springs are under a horrible curse, brought upon them by the spirit of the Black Rock Witch, who still wanders the town, her eyes and lips sewn shut to contain her dark power. The residents have acclimated to her visitations and even have a high-tech security team called Hex protect the town by keeping tabs on the witch and making sure news of her existence never reaches beyond their town. Unfortunately, there’s the Internet.

The Black Rock Witch is, by herself, a scary horror villain, a silent, corpse-like woman, eyes and lips sewn shut, basically free to wander the town as she sees fit. However, she’s not really the antagonist, and that’s what has made this story interesting, along with the novel idea of a secret curse trying to exist in our information age. Some may argue that the antagonists are the rebellious teens who manage to upload a video of the witch and get it out to the public. Others might argue that it’s the superstitious townspeople who let their fear go too far. Ultimately, there are many responsible for what ultimately happens to the citizens of Black Springs. 

3) Horrorstör byGrady Hendrix

In Cleveland, Ohio, the Orsk furniture superstore, part of a retail chain that sells inexpensive Swedish furniture, is being vandalized every night and the security cameras have caught nothing. A crew volunteers to work the night shift to hopefully catch the perpetrators in the act, but some of them believe that there is something supernatural at work. And of course they’re right.

The book definitely follows the haunted house formula as the crew is trapped within the haunted store and tries desperately to escape, but what makes this book stand out for me is the location. By setting this in a superstore and having the protagonists be workers for that store, the book is able to explore the angst felt by many in minimum wage jobs who might hate going to work and are wondering what had gone wrong in their life. Think a cross between Ghost Adventures and Office Space. I also advise reading the physical copy for the illustrations of the furniture/torture devices provided by illustrator Michael Roglaski.

2) Heart-Shaped Boxby Joe Hill

This is the book that let me discover Joe Hill, the pseudonym for Joe Hillstrom King, who could have lived his literary life as Stephen King, Jr. Far from being just a recycled King, Joe Hill adds a great deal of the fantastic to his stories, particularly to this ghost story where a ghost who lives in a dead man’s suit is purchased by aging rocker Judas Coyne to add to his collection of diabolical bric-a-brac. Unfortunately, the suit contains the vengeful spirit of Craddock McDermott, stepfather to a groupie that commits suicide.

Far from simply moving furniture, McDermott attacks the mind and the victim might be playing with a gun or knife in a way that is obviously not safe. A ghost that can have you doubting your own actions is indeed a scary adversary, but the novel also lets us explore what makes Coyne tick. Throughout the novel, he goes beyond the aging rock star cliché to show a character that, despite his share of demons, is someone the reader can root for, especially after the real relationship between rocker, groupie, and vengeful spirit is revealed, which is also an emotional punch in the stomach. 

1) The Shining byStephen King

Admittedly, I have a special place in my heart for this book. It was not only the book that let me discover Stephen King. It was the book that, as a high school senior, let me discover horror fiction. What really drew me into this book was that it was more than the creepy goings-on at the Overlook Hotel. What this book shows is how important the characters, the victims, are to a good ghost story.

The story of a family stranded at a Colorado hotel and whose patriarch descends into madness became a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, one with the author himself actually hated, but both movie and book use the claustrophobic atmosphere of a snowed-in hotel and show how an overall loving father can ultimately lose everything.

Danny Torrance, the boy with the titular Shining, understands what the ghosts are before any of the adults do, but what really pulled me into the book was watching the degenerative slide of the father Jack Torrance. The reader knows that Jack loves his family but is also deeply flawed. An alcoholic with anger management issues, he constantly bears the responsibility for the situation he puts his family in. The Overlook Hotel, and the haunts who reside there, are able to use these psychological flaws, from Jack’s crippling self-doubt to his explosive anger directed at others, to chip away at his defenses, forcing him to turn that anger on his family as he slips fully into madness. No other ghost story in recent memory has such a tragic figure turned antagonist as Jack Torrance. 

Got any ghost stories to suggest? Write to me at scarylibrarian43@gmail.com and share them.

Have You Read This? Review of Keith Donohue's The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue Review

Though they might never be mentioned in the Disney movies they eventually inspired, many fairy tales have a great many moments that would belong in any horror movie, from Hansel and Gretel pushing a witch into an oven to Ariel, the red-haired heroine in The Little Mermaid, gaining new legs she used to walk on land that always felt to her like she was walking on knives. Horror and fairy tales have a lot in common, particularly when the magic within the story enacts a terrible price.

Keith Donohue’s The Motion of Puppets, is a modern fairy tale. Kay, an acrobat, and Theo, a French professor, work in the city of Quebec. But their lives are uprooted when Kay discovers a mysterious puppet in a toy shop window, is transformed into a puppet, and forced to perform in the Quarte Mains show with all the other puppets who come alive from midnight to sunrise. Heartbroken, Theo searches for his wife and even risks journeying into the underworld where puppets don’t always need puppeteers.

Once Kay is transformed, the novel splits into two distinct narratives: one is Kay’s life as a puppet as she slowly forgets the human world she came from, and the other is Theo trying to deal with the loss of his wife before eventually suspending his disbelief and pursuing her into the magical realm that has ensnared her. Those who read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” or saw Lampwick transform into a donkey in Disney’s Pinocchio know about the horror inherent in transformation and subsequent loss of identity. This helps Theo’s search for Kay become a race against time. Will she be saved before she forgets being human? Will she also forget Theo’s love?

The puppets who share Kay’s fate have very distinct personalities (some were also human once), but they are not really the nightmare fuel of a Chucky. They garner the reader’s sympathies but it isn’t the puppets that make it scary. It is the gradual loss that Kay experiences while Theo inches agonizingly close to her without finding her that creates the tension that is the lifeblood of this novel and makes it one hard to put down. People have called this “Toy Story written by Stephen King” and this book does a deft job of showing just how blurred the line is between the fantastical and the horrific.