Kerfol (a ghost story)

 This is my fourth (fourth!) countdown to Halloween post today, but I am feeling inspired. An there is so little time left until my favourite holiday and so much to read, watch, blog about and overall enjoy. So I wanted to recommend a ghost story for you, which I mentioned before here. If you like classic ghost stories and ghost stories that are perfectly seasonal, I suggest you spend some time tonight to read Kerfol by Edith Wharton. It's set in autumn and it is full of atmosphere. It aslo shows that to create unease and fear, you don't need walking corpses. And you'll see there that ghosts can take many forms, even the most inconspicuous.

Autumnal ghost stories

This is tonight's countdown to Halloween post and I thought I would start with a reading suggestion. I am reading this book at the moment, the ghost stories of Edith Wharton. I am enjoying it quite a lot. She wrote very subtle ghost stories, where terror appears, but is not in your face as it is usually now with modern writers. I guess it is the old fashioned way, the horror that you perceive at the corner of your eyes. M.R. James was amazing at it, but even he used at some point its share of gore and violence. That said, she is a great atmospheric writer. And there is one thing that makes me appreciate her stories greatly: while many ghost stories written in her time were set during the Christmas season (a tradition that dates back from generations), her stories are so far set at least partially during autumn. And she really brings the season's menacing atmosphere. In Kerfol for instance, you have a line like this: "The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly." I love it. So that is my new reading recommendation.