darchildre | (no subject)

So, the other day, I checked out a copy of The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral by Robert Westall. The book contained the title novella (which I had read before, but when I was a kid) and another called "Brangwyn Gardens".

The title novella is delightful - a lovely, old-fashioned M R James-style ghost story, with an engaging and vivid voice for its first-personal narrator. Highly recommended.

But the second one was so disappointing that I had to write this post to complain about it. It also starts off as an old-fashioned style of ghost story: the one in which a student has rented a room in a creepy old house which has a creepy landlady and might be haunted. This is generally a type of spooky story I enjoy, so I had high hopes. The story is set in 1955 but the haunting is from WWII - long enough ago that the protagonist was alive during the Blitz, but was a small child. This also works, as the protagonist gets mixed up between his own memories and what may be ghostly occurrences. The atmosphere in general is very well done.

Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that this is one of those "the protagonist falls in love with a ghost" stories. I don't care for those very much - I am perhaps too aroace for the premise to work on me, so the idea of falling in love with someone via reading their diary and smelling the ghost of their perfume and going through their long-abandoned underthings (!) just seems creepy, in an unappealing way. But that's a personal thing - the idea of falling in love with a ghost certainly must work for a lot of people, as it's a fairly common ghost story type.

But then! So the creepy landlady the narrator despises has left the house for a few days and the narrator finally manages to unite with his ghostly lover by crossing time or whatever and they have sex. Okay. But then he wakes up the next morning, and his creepy landlady is there. She's the ghost - or rather, she isn't, because she never died, but the diary and the perfume and the underthings are hers. (It's only been 10-ish years, after all, and underneath her dowdy clothes she's only 36.) She planted those things for the protagonist to find. She's been doing this to her lodgers ever since the war - tricking them into thinking she was a tragic beautiful ghost, having sex with them under false pretenses (so, rape), and then kicking them out of her house because "It never works a second time. I've tried it." Ick.

God, I hate a fucking Scooby Doo ending where the ghost was Old Man Jenkins the whole time, and this one is so gross. The worst thing is that I was going to look for more of Westall's work based on the first novella, and now this one has soured me on the idea.

There is one good thing we get out of it, which is this exchange:

Instead, as something to say, he said lightly, 'So the house wasn't haunted after all, then?'

She looked at him straight for a moment; looking a handsome thirty-six-year-old, who even a lad of twenty-one might fancy. And then she got up and said, 'It's me that's the haunted house, Harry. Everybody gets to be a haunted house in the end.'

That's lovely. It's a shame that it had to be attached to such a disappointing story.