Ghost Stories

I’m a more-or-less rational person. Anything with even a whiff of mysticism strikes me as a great yawn. And I believe dead is dead. Case closed. La commedia è finita.

Curiously, I’m also a fan of ghost stories. Contradictory? Maybe it’s that I’ve been working at New York Public Library for so long, I’ve come to feel like a ghost myself, haunting its marble corridors.

Not to split genre hairs, but I’m not so enamored of horror stories--or movies, for that matter--particularly not modern ones, whose main purpose seems to be to dispatch as many people (frequently teenage girls) as gruesomely as possible. If I wanted to be horrified, I’d read the newspaper. I much prefer the quiet suggestiveness of the classic ghost story, whether it takes a fusty antiquarian approach or a cool modern one--as long as it’s based on the notion that the most frightening possibility is what might be lurking in the shadows. The minute we find out that the shadows contain some drooling, rat-faced thing with tentacles is when the giggles start.

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