The List #39: Boo!

Some Halloween Classics

“The ghost story is a legitimate form of art,” wrote C.S. Lewis. His theory was that ghost stories dramatize the Christian sense that the dead are uncanny, that spirit and flesh should not be separable and only some sort of aboriginal brokenness has made it so that they are.

I agree with this. One of the reasons I have always loved ghost stories is that, at their best, they produce, not horror, but a small, chilling sense of weirdness. When you read a great ghost story, it is as if you caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye and thought: “I’m not sure I saw that—but if I did, the world is very different than I believed it was.”

So, since Halloween is coming…