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Post by dem bones on Sept 24, 2022 9:06:42 GMT
Herbert de Hamel - The House of Dust: (The Blue Magazine, March 1920). Brevolt, occupied Belgium during the Great War. Captain Kurt von Unserbach of the Prussian Army is approached by two veiled women, a mother and her strikingly beautiful daughter, who request he escorts them past a group of drunken soldiers. On reaching their town house, tired from the walk, the mother retires to bed leaving the daughter to entertain their guest, which she does with aplomb. The following morning, the besotted von Unserbach makes enquires after the midnight lover, whose name he didn't quite catch. Furious with the ridiculous fairy tale the fool Prefect has to tell him, he insists the latter accompany him top the scene of last night's adventure. What they find there drives the Captain out of his mind. An excellent ghost story.
Penelope Lively - Uninvited Guests: (Uninvited Ghosts and Other Stories, 1984). Haining gives the address as Norham Gardens, Oxford, though can't recall any mention of it in the text. Anyway, no sooner have the Brown's moved in to their new home than the mischievous resident spooks —'the Ghost,' a wacky aunt and uncle, Dip the dog — make their presence known, but only to the children. How can Marian and Simon be rid of these affable but exasperating phantoms? Can't say I cared for this one.
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Post by weirdmonger on Jan 12, 2023 17:11:14 GMT
Fay Weldon - Watching Me, Watching You: ( Women's Own, Jan. 1981). The ghost first entered 66 Aldermans Drive, Bristol, on the shoulder of a parlourmaid returned from a séance where she'd failed to make contact with her dead lover. It has stayed ever since to pry upon the tangled relationships, infidelities, divorces, and tragedies of those who've lived there right through to 1980, occasionally intervening on the side of women wronged. ….spanning 1965 to 1980 in a city’s suburbs and the lives that link a couple of those houses and also the ghost that journeys between them carrying their fates as burdens and as catalyst or cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause upon or by humans who live or grow there, or all of these things — their cursed endings one of which ignited the ghost, their later marital flings or permanent disloyalties, the consequent births of more humans as potential people with subsequent growth into such people, and the necessity of at least one of them to write something worthwhile that also pays money. To keep the ghost from the door. The author now, in our own real-time, is all of those things, even this story’s gestalt as ghost or ghost as gestalt? RIP Fay Weldon
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