“The Phantom Riders” (1896)

This story by Ernest R. Suffling is not bad but leans very hard into its effects, which are not that interesting or effective. It’s in that style of horror which assumes just mentioning or describing ghostly sightings is enough. Maybe so for another age, or in other circumstances. I can see this working as a story told aloud after dark, when the mood is gullible, for example. It feels to me like an Anglo-Saxon type of story at its heart, with virtuous values. One man, who is a slothful local guy, takes for granted that a woman in the neighborhood is his to have when he’s ready to marry. But another man comes along and falls in love with her. She feels the same about him and they are engaged to marry within three weeks. The date set for the announcement is Christmas Eve. That’s about all it has to do with Christmas, incidentally. The local guy won’t hear of this union and murders his rival off-stage. Then it’s on to the ghost effects, which are quite explicit. The ghost of one and then the other appear at the Christmas Eve gathering for the announcement. Separately, they appear and go behind a curtain in an alcove. Everyone at the gathering is petrified. The next day the body of one is found and later the body of the other. The one is murder, the other an accidental death. The following year this same bunch (more or less) travels on Christmas Eve to the site where the first body was found, where they witness the murder reenacted by ghostly figures. This scares the hell out of them too. And the year after that, so two years on, an intrepid band of sleuths views the reenactment and gives chase to the ghost of the murderer to witness his fate (the accidental death) and also to learn where he hid some documents he stole from the victim. It finishes as a ridiculously rational story, losing most of what punch it had by trying to explain too many things. The documents are irretrievably ruined after two years in the elements—I kind of like the bleak note there, and in other places in this story. But mostly it feels like “comfort horror,” perhaps best related in campfire or similar situations. At Christmastime, sure, why not, sounds good for the ghost story hour after dark before putting the kids to bed, etc. I like the story pretty well on that level. Also, the ghost effects are pretty good—predictable and obvious, yes, but they can work.

Yuletide Frights, ed. William P. Simmons

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Read story online (scroll down).

The Batman (2022)

The Batman I grew up with was the cartoony version from the ‘50s and ‘60s, with Bob Kane’s name all over it and filled with gimmicky villains, which led inevitably to the Batman TV show starring Adam West. At the time (approximately age 11) I hated that show for revealing that this cartoony version was a joke. In the ‘70s, DC comics creators tried to evoke the original Batman I never knew—the vengeance-driven orphaned wraith of the night whose name was uttered with the definite article, the Batman—but I was never convinced by it until the Frank Miller version in the ‘80s. Obviously I wasn’t the only one impressed with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, as this dark knight Batman took hold, swelled up, and led a charge into the movies, where Tim Burton had the first crack at it, Christopher Nolan made a trilogy out of it, and earlier this year came The Batman from director and cowriter Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In, a couple of Planet of the Apes pictures in the 2010s). This mighty epic Batman is only five minutes short of three hours, though a 12-minute credit roll at the end cuts into the length a little. We’ve had Michael Keaton in the role, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and many more, and now we have Robert Pattinson (Twilight, The Childhood of a Leader, The Lighthouse, etc.), who somehow reminds us that maybe Adam West was the best idea in the first place. That TV show looks better all the time—I’m not 11 anymore and can enjoy the joke. Also, I keep hearing that some of the animated versions from the ’90s are the best Batmans. I should check them out.

Anyway, look, this version of the same old dark Batman story is fine, dotting i’s and crossing t’s as we get all the familiar elements rejiggered slightly: Bruce Wayne the orphan, his faithful servant and father figure Alfred, a police origin story for Commissioner Gordon, plus the Catwoman, the Riddler, and pretty sure that’s the Joker they’re teasing at the end. Which reminds me, like the 2019 Joker, The Batman basically wallows operatically in Batman tropes, with a particular fascination about Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s super-rich biological father that Bruce sees assassinated one way or another (it’s not a tragic stickup in this version and there’s some stuff new to me about his mother). The Batman is long, but clips along respectably. Pattinson seems more like a Robin than a Batman—a bit young when the mask comes off, looking maybe 24 years old? He was about 34 when the movie was made but it’s a young 34. He’s not burdened with the voice effects of Bale in the Nolan movies, thankfully. How was he supposed to make his voice do that anyway? As always for me, the costumes place it well beyond any believability. For the kind of impressive outdoors athletic stunts we see here, for example, a cape is obviously not just a hindrance but positively a danger to safety. The Batmobile makes an appearance—it’s reminiscent of the TV show with the rear jet propulsion but then reminiscent (to the point of homage?) of the spectacular chase scenes in The Dark Knight from 2008, still the best dark Batman movie of all. I like the treatment of the Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz) here and Paul Dano as the Riddler is as amazing as the notices have said, though we have seen this giggling madman shtick from him before and, truthfully, the Riddler is a shabby foe generally with his dumbass riddles. In short, The Batman has virtually no surprises, but it is so competent as a big-ticket movie—Michael Mann is another obvious inspiration—that people are likely to be looking at it in the holiday season for many years to come. May as well give in to it sooner rather than later.

“Remorseless Vengeance” (1902)

I like this story by Guy Boothby, though maybe not as much as the title, which is so grim it’s comical. It’s another horror story set at Christmastime that is hard to call Christmassy. Perhaps it’s more in the spirit if read aloud after dark. It has an exotic setting with a sailor’s story of being down and out in Batavia (now Jakarta), Indonesia. The juxtaposition with Christmas as we know it is much of what makes the story work (albeit in a somewhat colonialist frame). As you probably guessed from the title, it’s a story of betrayal and retribution, with lots of intrigue and shady motivations. Our first-person narrator is stranded by sickness. Now just recovering and in debt, he is approached by a Captain Berringer who is well known in the story. He wants help abducting a certain general because, as revealed later, this general executed Berringer’s brother by hanging him the year before on Christmas day. We’re not told why. Once the general has been taken and is aboard Berringer’s ship it turns out Berringer intends to hang him in revenge, also on Christmas. Our guy (the first-person narrator and stranded sailor) is part of it now and tries to talk Berringer out of the murder. But Berringer is set on it. That night the ghost of the dead brother appears to Berringer and tells him to back off—the revenge is his to take. Berringer disagrees. “I’ve passed my word, and I’ll not depart from it,” he says. “Ghost or no ghost, he hangs at sunrise.” The next morning, as preparation for the hanging goes forward, Berringer sees something that frightens him to death. Meanwhile the general has died in his bed. A witness says, “God help me—you never saw such a sight! It looked as if he were fighting with someone whom we could not see, and was being slowly strangled.” That’s pretty much the end of the story. Good night, children, sleep tight! Santa Claus comes tonight. And so forth. In fact, I’m a little surprised, now that I have figured out these things exist, that I could not find anyone reading it aloud for a youtube video. It works reasonably well, even if I prefer horror stories that feel at least a little Christmassy, if they’re going to use the holiday. I also like the untidiness of this story, with things left unexplained. Why was the brother hanged? Why wouldn’t the living brother, Captain Berringer, defer to his ghost brother? Why did Berringer die? Don’t know, don’t know—and that’s the way it should be, when you can pull it off, as I would say this story does. Balancing explanation and the lack of it is tricky business. Here it’s used to confuse us a little and throw us off just when the story, which requires a fair amount of setup, seems to be getting predictable. The ending does not feel predictable at all even though in many ways it is.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Eraserhead (1977)

USA, 89 minutes

Director/writer/editor: David Lynch

Photography: Herbert Cardwell, Frederick Elmes

Music: David Lynch, Peter Ivers, Fats Waller

Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates, Laurel Near, Judith Roberts

David Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, was a project connected to his time as a student at the American Film Institute and took him something like five years to complete. It came to attention commercially the only way it could have, basically. That is, as a “midnight movie” in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, winning accolades from Stanley Kubrick (who required the cast of The Shining to look at it to get in the mood), John Waters, and, most importantly, Mel Brooks, who gave everything-man David Lynch a shot at directing The Elephant Man. Eraserhead fits the bill for a midnight movie perfectly—it’s weird, never stops being weird, and has no explanations. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a man living in an industrial wasteland out of Pere Ubu album covers and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (although Eraserhead came out two years before Stalker). Come to find out, Henry previously had sexual intercourse with a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and she gave birth to an extremely deformed baby.

Or, as Mary cries out in some distress when her mother confronts Henry about the situation, “Mother, they’re still not sure it is a baby!” In fact, the prop used to memorably represent it (which never gets a name) was reportedly an embalmed cow’s calf carcass, animated by techniques Lynch has still not revealed. Nance later played Pete Martell in Lynch’s Twin Peaks franchise and it’s interesting to see the friendly figure so much younger and alienating. It’s the baby thing that is the star of the show, however, a kind of rorschach special effect for which we develop tender feelings in spite of revulsion. In appearance it reminds me of the rabbit carcass in Repulsion. By the time it is sick and Henry is taking its temperature we simply care for it. It cries a lot like a baby, which is one of the ways it gets under our skin. By way of the narrative, or perhaps the special effects, this terrible thing comes to have all the pathos for us of a human baby or any mammal infant. It is grotesque but somehow cute at the same time, and its health can become even more a cause of concern for us than for anyone in the movie. By this time, the movie is so weird it almost feels like it is consuming us as we watch.

Main Street (1920)

I like a lot of things about the social realism of Sinclair Lewis and enjoyed rereading what is probably his single most famous novel. He wrote quite a bit, nearly two dozen novels, and there are a few others that may or may not be worth chasing down—Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth. I’ve had different reactions. Lewis is also from Minnesota and very good on Upper Midwestern ways. I like the characters and situations of Main Street but a lot of it is dated, potentially boring, and even just weirdly improbable. The main character, Carol Kennicott (nee Milford), is from Minneapolis, the daughter of a judge. She marries a small-town doctor, moves to the town (Gopher Prairie aka Sauk Centre), and confronts its narrow, constricted ways. Of course she is a bit of a snob but she comes by it honestly, in pursuit of her city-bred ideals of art and bohemianism. At heart, though she barely comes to realize it even at the end, she is merely a privileged upper-middle-class woman of her times. She hates class distinctions and claims to despise them, but for the most part she conforms. But she is always testing the limits, often with an amazing amount of naivete. There are relevant points all through the novel: hostility toward immigrants (here mostly Swedes, now accepted as white), blind fealty to capitalism, and refreshingly candid views of marriage and wives and husbands. More often it is strangely irrelevant, silent on the influenza pandemic, which was still ongoing at the time of publication (and one main character is a doctor!), with little to say about suffrage or prohibition, and completely blind to LGBTQ issues. There’s a significant character here who is likely gay, but I’m not sure even Lewis knows it. That’s quite a taboo. But Lewis was always good on at least a couple of things, which are seen here. He has a good ear for American salesman chatter. That’s practically all Babbitt is (and worth looking into) and it’s here too. And then I also think he’s really good—and underrated—on domestic scenes, marriage and particularly women. Carol Kennicott is at the center of Main Street. She is complex and done well. It’s true that much of it is dated and has not aged well. But a good deal of it is easily recognized as merely the ins and outs of any relationship. Lewis would get better at this too, but even putting Carol Kennicott front and center and establishing her as realistic works for me on the most basic terms. Lewis has spent nearly a century now falling out of favor after his unlikely Nobel award in 1930. But I like his open-hearted easygoing style quite a bit, a kind of Dreiser-lite that is a pleasure to read. Or maybe that’s a Minnesota connection.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959)

I’ve long been a fan of Marty Robbins’s hit story-song “El Paso” whenever it comes up on oldies radio, but I did not know there was a whole album of such fare. Then I ran across this strange gem in that fat tome The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time, where it is part of the relatively skimpy offering for the 1950s. Mojo calls it “the first successful C&W concept album.” It’s 12 songs (or more now, depending on the edition), all of them virtual narratives about shooting big guns, roping wild horses, getting hanged in the town square, so on so forth, all recorded in one night. Robbins wrote a third of them, two are traditional (“Billy the Kid” and “Utah Carol”), and a motley of songwriters provide the rest. There’s nothing that feels particularly authentic about any of these songs—they are a kind of Brill Building project, overproduced and shining with studio gloss—but they are peculiarly listenable and even affecting, if “El Paso” has ever reached you. I tend to like the hanging and/or jail songs best (“They’re Hanging Me Tonight,” “The Hanging Tree,” the latter from a 1999 reissue) but they’re all pretty good if you’re in the mood. “Big Iron” and a cover of “Cool Water,” which open the original album, are reasonably effective for putting you in the mood. It occurred to me recently, getting to know it, that Gunfighter Ballads came out the same year as the movie Rio Bravo. It was perhaps a moment, in 1959, when movies and TV and pop music were colliding at will and why not get the western genre into it as well? Therefore, clap Marty Robbins—whose biggest hit to that point was “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation”)—into a Lash LaRue outfit for the album cover, wearing a funny flattop cowboy hat and a big iron on his hip, and meanwhile stick Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin into your shoot-‘em-up. The results, by acclamation, are one of the greatest albums ever made and one of the greatest movies ever made. Robbins sings tunefully, like a deep-throated songbird with a tender warble in his voice, while Nelson, as the Colorado kid, lets his trembling chin provide the visual counterpart. A handful of songs in the vein would follow in the ‘60s, such as “Big Bad John” (1961, by Jimmy Dean, not that Jimmy Dean) and “Ringo” (1964, by Lorne Green, then star of the TV western Bonanza), not to mention more authentic business from Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Tammy Wynette, etc. Truth be told, Robbins is much closer to the Lorne Green end of that spectrum (and Ricky Nelson if we must, but there’s more musically to Nelson or his taste). But “El Paso,” as always, is the benchmark here. If you can get into that one, you can get into this whole album. But you may want to take it slow as these songs can produce unruly sugar highs taken in such massive doses as a whole album.

“A Strange Christmas Game” (1868)

This story by Mrs. J.H. Riddell (aka Charlotte Riddell) was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. It’s the last story in a Lamplight magazine I have—I liked this story but alas none of the others. They didn’t even give Mrs. Riddell an author bio! And they also misspelled her name, which took some time to straighten out with google searches. While reading it I had been impressed by what a remarkably good facsimile of a Victorian gothic it seemed to be. There’s nothing that special about it as a ghost story except it’s just quietly effective. Not so much scary, but an interesting and absorbing anecdote, a kind of tale of spirit manners. An impoverished brother and sister unexpectedly inherit an estate but things about it are not right. First they learn of a mystery—one of their ancestors who lived there suddenly disappeared after last being seen on a Christmas Eve. Since then, nobody has wanted to stay overnight in the mansion. It’s all whispers and innuendo, but the general idea abroad in the region is that it’s haunted, two rooms specifically, a poltergeist variation that takes the form of unruly stomping noises at night. There may be visions too for those brave enough to pass a night in those rooms, but few are. The brother and sister are that brave, however, and they are even able to expel the presence. But it takes its toll on them. They solve the mystery of the disappearance while they’re at it. Afterward, the sister moves away and marries and refuses even to visit the place again. It’s hard to know what I would think of this story if I’d known more about it beforehand, like that it is actually old. Thinking it was more contemporary I took it as someone trying to “do” an old-fashioned ghost story. And I thought they did a good job of it too—better than others I’ve seen. Ironically, I did take some of it as trying too hard to be old-fashioned. It’s possible I would not have liked it as much knowing it was actually old. But in the context of thinking it was a contemporary I was really taken by it. It also has a Christmas setting that works very well, even though it’s mostly incidental. It’s still good atmospherics.

Lamplight, Vol. 9, No. 2 (December 2020)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Barbarian (2022)

As many ecstatically raving fans and critics have noted, Barbarian is a movie best seen knowing as little about it beforehand as possible. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly difficult as its highly warranted reputation swells up and it starts making best-of lists. People are going to talk about it. I’m going to talk about it. Better get to it—streaming prices are within reach. One reviewer (at spooky astronauts on youtube) noticed the way it triggers fear responses, based on a reading by director and writer Zach Cregger of Gavin de Becker’s nonfiction self-help book for women, The Gift of Fear, which identifies the subtle warning signs when confronting dangerous men. Cregger exploits these cues over and over, switching them up and ratcheting them constantly, notably in the first third. Everything seems wrong in this movie, always, but it never leaves you time to take a sober second look. Some of its tricks may include the following. The premise: a young educated professional woman, Tess (Georgina Campbell), is traveling to Detroit for a job interview. The Airbnb she booked has been double-booked and someone is already there, a young man who seems safe but is not easy to read. Outside it is night and storming with a heavy rain. The setting: the abandoned sections of Detroit, apparently shot on location. Tess arrives at night. The sight of the neighborhood by daylight the next morning is shocking. It looks dangerous even if we are seeing it in a movie. The irrational house interior: Barbarian features a house (on Barbary Street, source of the movie’s name by my best guess) that is much more than it seems, with a basement, unpleasant rooms, and even further subterranean levels cut from stone. The structure: after taking us on an insane 40-minute ride complete with horrifying climax, Barbarian shifts gears and becomes a kind of comedy featuring a boyish wannabe Hollywood bigshot producer, AJ (Justin Long). He is suddenly caught up in a sexual misconduct scandal that will ruin his brief career. It’s entertaining, and a nice breather, but what the hell it has to do with the house in Detroit is made clear only when it turns out he is the owner, and needs to liquidate his assets to cover legal expenses. The thing that lives there: I don’t want to talk about this part. You have to see it for yourself, but it is ingenious, outrageous, and terrifying all at once. Barbarian never stops being something other than what you expect. It is actually scary in multiple parts in multiple ways. I have no idea what it looks like on further review. But the first time through is a real trip.

The Horizontal Man (1946)

This somewhat awkwardly written suspense novel by Helen Eustis was slow going for me, but it had some interesting ideas. It’s a standard murder mystery in many ways. The murder occurs on the first page without revealing the killer and then a number of likely suspects start showing up. In the end, we learn who did it. All’s fair. The setting is an upscale college for women. The victim is a philandering poetry professor. The novel flashes across points of view in the short sections advancing the investigation. Two characters probably qualify as the main characters—a young journalist and a student who edits the college paper, Kate Innes. Kate is overweight, or big, and there is an untoward amount of fat-shaming here, one of the most obvious ways this novel is dated but not the only one. The journalist thinks of Kate as “Fatty” although at least he keeps that to himself. His strategy with her is shaming her when they eat. These two fall in love. The journalist is given as more or less normal and otherwise without malice. At least two other professors have strong potential to be gay (and no, it’s not a good thing) while a woman professor is considered over the hill and a slut. She’s 42. So lots of problems here, forgivable enough maybe “for the times,” but that’s compounded with a sluggish and overly busy plotline and a leaden style of writing. The action is pitched at hysterical levels but even so I was often bored with it and/or losing the thread from all the POV jumping around. It does have a surprise or twist ending that I did not see coming, a bizarre explanation that fits with the general pseudo-Freudian air here—hysteria, mental institutions, various transparent emotional complexes. This one’s got it all, or too much, which is to say it’s inevitably flawed. I think I could handle even the psychological mumbo jumbo at the end if the whole thing had a stronger through line. It’s a first novel for Eustis and won an Edgar in the first-novel category. Lots of people seem to like it a lot. I like the supercharged atmosphere, but it often bogs down even as a very short novel. It comes at a strange juncture for feminism. By 1946 women had won the vote and shown they could shoulder the labor of a nation during war. But this novel focuses on continuing preoccupations with femininity and marriage with men. Freda Cramm, the 42-year-old oversexed crone, is recognizably a feminist but her life is quite evidently unenviable even with her independence and self-reliance. Does Eustis the author buy into these views? That’s hard to say. She doesn’t seem to care much for any of her characters, male or female. As a sendup of life at a women’s college, The Horizontal Man might be pretty good, but unfortunately women’s colleges are more a thing of the past now too.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

USA, 83 minutes

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Writers: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, Aladar Laszlo, Ernst Lubitsch

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: W. Franke Harling

Editor: unknown?

Cast: Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, Charles Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith, Leonid Kinskey

What a difference the Hays Code makes. Until those rules for Hollywood movie decorum came along in 1934, addressing problems that may or may not have existed, the idea in some outraged circles was apparently that anything goes on Hollywood movie sets. Come to find out, it’s “anything goes” for its time, most of it more like knowing and witty, not necessarily coarse. It’s not like there is nudity in Trouble in Paradise or anything like that, just lifelong criminals getting away with it and laughing about it, plus various jolts of sophisticated European adultery (most of it with perfectly conventional values). It’s the Lubitsch touch, more or less, the lightly cynical, lightly romantic take on human affairs of director and cowriter Ernst Lubitsch.

He remains a titan of his time, though sometimes it seems he is more like forgotten now. Billy Wilder reputedly had a sign in his office which read, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Even before Alfred Hitchcock, Lubitsch was one of the earliest examples of a Hollywood director famous for a uniquely recognizable style. “Lubitsch was always the least Germanic of German directors,” the critic Andrew Sarris wrote of him, “as Lang was the most Germanic.” There’s little question Trouble in Paradise could not have been made even three years later.

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Chinua Achebe’s novel has become a classic look at life in Nigeria before and after the coming of colonialists. More than half of it is focused on the time just before missionaries and other conquering Europeans show up. It was not a perfect idyll and it’s easy to see many problems in that society. Our main character, Okonkwo, is a proud self-made man among his people, a championship wrestler and a warrior renowned for his kills. He has three wives and several children. He is abusive and demanding, quick to knock people around when he loses his temper (including his wives). He seems to lose his temper a lot. Yet he is also widely respected by village elders. Okonkwo’s father was weak, passing down a shameful legacy which Okonkwo transcended. One area of particular non-enlightenment in this village is with gender, as usual. Women are not treated well and it is a devastating insult for a weak man to be called “a woman.” Just when you’re starting to wonder about colonialism, the second half comes along. At the end of the first part Okonkwo commits a serious offense, and though it is an accident he is exiled from the village for seven years. During that time missionaries appear and begin to convert tribe members. The missionaries appeal first to tribal outcasts and gather influence and momentum from there. Eventually Okonkwo’s son becomes a convert, which creates rifts and tensions across the larger family. Okonkwo practically disowns him as “a woman” but these colonialists knew what they were doing, dividing to conquer. It’s really hard to watch once it starts. Okonkwo is old school and ignorant of Europeans. His solution is to fight back and make war, but by then it’s too late and only causes him more and more problems. Achebe’s writing style is simple and straightforward, almost serene. Except for the novel’s reputation I wasn’t sure where it was headed in the first half, which is a portrait of that culture’s old ways—the things that will fall apart. Seeing the way colonialism works is moving and vivid in its clarity. But the story is not just about colonialism but also a powerful character study of Okonkwo—complex, imperfect, fascinating. Okonkwo and other village figures believe they have a good deal of power, and they do within their society. But that society is under attack—the missionaries are sent in first to soften the ground—and then we see Okonkwo’s whole world systematically destroyed. Achebe’s voice is placid but what he describes is enraging. He maintains a perfect balance between the two modes until the very end. Powerful novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Blind Man’s Hood” (1937)

This story by John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson) is mainly a ghost story, though for some reason it also has elements of a locked-room mystery—possibly Carr’s market instinct for detective fiction kicking in. He was more generally a mystery writer. But the most effective moments in this story, which are usually matters of precise detail, make it a reasonably unsettling spook story. It’s set at Christmastime, with a young couple arriving late on Christmas Eve for a visit with the family of friends at an isolated mansion in the countryside. All the lights in the house are on and the door is ajar (in December!), but no one appears to be home. They bang on the door, then gather up their things and enter. A young woman appears who claims she didn’t hear them knocking. They don’t know her. It was immediately evident to me this was a ghost, and further small details confirm it. The corner of her eye is gray rather than pink, for example. She has a convoluted story to tell them—about why the house is empty, about the things that happened there, about betrayal and revenge of a sort. It really doesn’t make much sense but often feels ominous. This story tends to telegraph its basic plot twists and is basically a straightforward ghost story, the kind of tale told around campfires and designed chiefly to produce feelings of unease. Making sense is not a requirement of these things. The young woman ghost is toting around a kind of opaque pillowcase she says is more effective than a handkerchief for a blindfold in games of blind man’s buff (here called blind man’s bluff). She says the way to do it is by draping it over the player’s head and cinching it closed at the neck. She says it’s too easy to cheat and peek out from under a handkerchief. The game is key to the story’s climax, which is why this is all explained so early and in such detail. Actually, the whole locked-room mystery side of this story was a little bit of a hindrance to me. Things don't necessarily have to add up in a ghost story. In the best of them, blatantly impossible things with no explanation at all often make the story better. On the other hand, the best of them often work toward some kind of smash-bang surprise at the end. This one just sort of peters out. But it has the holiday spirit about it and some effective moments.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.