User Profile

Quite excited to be starting this

The subject matter is very interesting though, and the legwork has clearly been put into researching it. My interest in the phenomenon of the C19 seance has certainly been piqued, and there are some good references here for further reading 👍

I've not had a lot time for reading anything other than technical manuals recently, but I finally finished this one last night, and I still have very mixed feelings about it tbh.

It's just quite badly organized. Some things get repeated, some things get skipped over when they really need to be developed, sometimes the thread of a chapter is weirdly tenuous and disappointed, sometimes you ask yourself, "is this really the best quote you could find to support this position?"

I don't know how much of the blame belongs to the writer though, because this is all stuff that an editor should have picked up on. A shame, because this book could have been beat into far better shape imo.

Hmmm I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it's a fascinating subject that I've never seen treated all in one place before, and the writer seems to know it inside-out; on the other, he often makes strange leaps, or frames a chapter around rather flimsy coincidence — one chapter tries to draw a line between the Martin Luther's conception of the word 'poltergeist' and the Third Reich ffs!

The chapter on M.R. James is pretty great though, so 🤷

Finding this very interesting so far!

I had never considered this, but apparently belief in ghosts was repressed under protestant rule because their existence implies the existence of purgatory, which the protestants rejected. Maybe the book will go into it later, but imo this dynamic might go some way to explaining the tendency in American ghost stories (particularly movies) to present ghosts as demons rather than... ghosts

Switching things up with a bit of social history (that is also about ghosts)

Absolutely stunning.

Hit and miss if I'm being honest. A couple of gems, but I've read better Shirley Jackson shorts in other collections 🤷

Great stuff so far

Excellent stuff. The characters and world are so utterly convincing that when the uncanny moments hit, they really hit.