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connorshirs's review against another edition
3.0
This left me kind of puzzled, I still can't quite understand what happened. Maybe that's the point, who knows? I did like this novella, Oleron and Elsie had a very interesting relationship, is it love? One-sided, yes. Many highly regarded horror writers have cited The Beckoning Fair One as one of the greatest ghost stories ever written. This one didn't chill me like Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu, Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You by M.R. James, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James did. Even Ambrose Bierce's ghost stories are better. That being said, this novel succeeded with its characters and left me confused, which I think some horror aims to do.
becka6131's review against another edition
4.0
Can't imagine why I attached so strongly to yet another story where someone becomes gradually trapped in/haunted by/consumed by their house. This one had a few very sharp lines about the drudgery of writing when you're exhausted with your subject matter, and overall was just a very good ghost story with a harrowing conclusion.
akemi_666's review against another edition
2.0
It's come to my attention that ghost stories can be read as parables of intergenerational trauma; that those haunted by the dead are sequestered into a dissociative theatre to re-enact the past unto an eternal deferral of the future. Through possessions and hauntings the living play out their own deaths without an end in sight. Living death is much like ptsd, it's a death you cannot die, a violation from without that settles into one's inmost core. It's history, congealed beyond articulation; bodies trapped in their own temporal loops. The possessed becomes the possessor, the traumatised becomes the traumatiser.
The fantasy of ghost stories is that speaking the historical injustice will end this loop. Its inverse fantasy is that the loop is eternal, unchangeable, human-nature. Both are simplistic narratives. Change only happens through loops, through repetition. The formation of new habits requires a deeper engagement with the past, of which acknowledgement is the first step. If there is a human-nature it is malleable, fixed only insofar as the assemblages it is constituted through remain the same. Knowing, feeling, and doing occur through bodily practices aligned to institutional frameworks. Moving through one's home and one's workplace, through malls, and streets, and gyms, and cafes. Setting boundaries, coming to consensus, voicing one's pain to a friend or colleague, accepting critique, standing up for oneself. These are all intersubjective phenomena that are not merely internalised, but actively reinforced (as well as undone) through social engagements.
Perhaps this is the failing of so many ghost stories. They depict the ontological rupture and its subsequent restoration (or continuation) as all too clean. Something happens, something unhappens (or never stops happening). There is no social act that transforms the haunted space; there is only the lone protagonist whose revelation speaks truth into being (or merely primes them to their inescapable fate as the next victim-victimiser in line). Ghost stories are all too singular and ahistorical, despite their evocation of historical wrongs.
Perhaps this is the brilliance of newer horror films such as Get Out, which pivot the ghostly and the weird as an intersection of differently situated bodies vying for political hegemony. Intergenerational trauma is ghostly precisely through its capacity to efface the pain and subjectivity of the other. To make the other invisible—even to themselves. To colonise the mind. Black bodies become the terrain through which colonial history progresses, a terra nullius for white becoming—the horror of becoming a nameless, faceless spook, once more.
Horror is the repetition of history, not as a house of strange accidents and shrieks, but as a system of domination whose social articulation is uncontested, roots sunken so deeply in time we believe no other reality could flourish in its place.
The fantasy of ghost stories is that speaking the historical injustice will end this loop. Its inverse fantasy is that the loop is eternal, unchangeable, human-nature. Both are simplistic narratives. Change only happens through loops, through repetition. The formation of new habits requires a deeper engagement with the past, of which acknowledgement is the first step. If there is a human-nature it is malleable, fixed only insofar as the assemblages it is constituted through remain the same. Knowing, feeling, and doing occur through bodily practices aligned to institutional frameworks. Moving through one's home and one's workplace, through malls, and streets, and gyms, and cafes. Setting boundaries, coming to consensus, voicing one's pain to a friend or colleague, accepting critique, standing up for oneself. These are all intersubjective phenomena that are not merely internalised, but actively reinforced (as well as undone) through social engagements.
Perhaps this is the failing of so many ghost stories. They depict the ontological rupture and its subsequent restoration (or continuation) as all too clean. Something happens, something unhappens (or never stops happening). There is no social act that transforms the haunted space; there is only the lone protagonist whose revelation speaks truth into being (or merely primes them to their inescapable fate as the next victim-victimiser in line). Ghost stories are all too singular and ahistorical, despite their evocation of historical wrongs.
Perhaps this is the brilliance of newer horror films such as Get Out, which pivot the ghostly and the weird as an intersection of differently situated bodies vying for political hegemony. Intergenerational trauma is ghostly precisely through its capacity to efface the pain and subjectivity of the other. To make the other invisible—even to themselves. To colonise the mind. Black bodies become the terrain through which colonial history progresses, a terra nullius for white becoming—the horror of becoming a nameless, faceless spook, once more.
Horror is the repetition of history, not as a house of strange accidents and shrieks, but as a system of domination whose social articulation is uncontested, roots sunken so deeply in time we believe no other reality could flourish in its place.
nedjem's review against another edition
4.0
The start of the story was slow and I had to force myself to push through it, but slowly it got me into its grip and turned into quite a fascinating story that I enjoyed quite a bit.
Was it a ghost who got the main character in its grip, or did he have a psychotic breakdown from the stress? That is left open for the reader to contemplate and decide.
Was it a ghost who got the main character in its grip, or did he have a psychotic breakdown from the stress? That is left open for the reader to contemplate and decide.
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