Other Worlds

Category: Talking about fiction

  • Thoughts on The Hobbit (the movie)

    Carpal tunnel syndrome has kept me off the computer except for what I had to do for work, so I am late in continuing with my “Hobbit”-related posts. Since the movie has been out for over a month now, I will dispense with issuing alerts against spoilers and will assume that you’ve either seen the…

  • The Hobbit’s ancient beginning

    As I was setting forth into rereading Chapter 1 of The Hobbit, I started getting a sense of … remindedness. What was this chapter reminding me of? The first sentence, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” is very direct and brisk in getting to the story, and right after that you…

  • The Hobbit (the movie) U.S. release day approaches…

    Everyone who cares, and a lot of people who don’t, are aware that the Peter Jackson movie of ‘The Hobbit’ is about to be released in the US. It’s a week away, and I’ll probably be in the theater to see it on Friday unless something unexpected prevents me. I have misgivings, though. This is what…

  • Honeysuckle Cottage (P. G. Wodehouse, 1925)

    What? P. G. Wodehouse… ghost story? Are we maybe in an alternate universe? Should we allow… [lowered voice] comedy? Think of it as something light and refreshing after the challenging perplexities of Henry James. Purists will not allow “Honeysuckle Cottage” into the genre, but … OK, I will. We begin with Mr. Mulliner, a regular…

  • The Turn of the Screw (Henry James, 1898)

    Everybody’s heard of it. The title is intriguing and mysterious and memorable. But, oh… Henry James… I read “The Turn of the Screw” in college and was surprised and disappointed by the dullness of it. Then, after I read James’ The American, I swore never to touch anything by him again. Fast forward some decades:…

  • What is a ghost story?

    Looking for a definition, I found in the Oxford Companion to English Literature that a ghost story is a narrative that has as its central theme “the power of the dead to return and confront the living.” This definition captures the heart of this kind of story, but it leaves out such supernatural creatures as…

  • Green Tea (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1869)

    It’s been a rough week, in terms of having time for blogging. I’ve still been reading new stories, but haven’t written about them. A ghost story or two each night… I’ve had some unsettling dreams, and one story in particular (“Madame Crowl’s Ghost” by Le Fanu) I would not recommend to anyone else for that…

  • Wandering Willie’s Tale (Sir Walter Scott, 1824)

    This one was new to me, and it’s a fine tale. Sir Robert Redgauntlet, 17th century Scottish laird under Charles II, is an enthusiastic persecutor of Covenanters (Scottish Presbyterians, see this): Glen, nor dargle, nor mountain, nor cave, could hide the puir hill-folk when Redgauntlet was out with bugle and bloodhound after them, as if…

  • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving, 1820)

    I was jotting a list of ghost stories to read in October — or revisit, if a favorite — and for that purpose I also found a short history of the genre. It seems that Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a landmark in the early development of the ghost story. (That’s not…

  • Season of Mists and Hauntings

    When the days are getting chilly and the nights long, I start turning to ghost stories. The time has to be right: it must be dark outside, and fairly late, and I in bed, with one bedside light. And then, in the quiet, I open an M. R. James volume, or Le Fanu, or Blackwood……