Review: How To Make A Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

For the past two weeks, I have been profoundly dissociating. I am hovering somewhere in the recesses of my own brain, watching every action my body performs with mild disinterest. Physical and emotional sensations are muffled, and I feel as if I’ve been covered by an avalanche. I can sort of hear the sounds on the surface, but they don’t have anything to do with me. I’ve become utterly chthonic.

At least I’m floating somewhere in the ether with Keats’s benevolent ghost.

Keats is a totem for many like us, a reminder that it is okay to feel too much or not at all, that inhabiting limitless bodies is part of the Mystery. Wilson begins this combination memoir, literary criticism, and biography with these words: Instead of killing himself, Keats ate a nectarine.

This is a book for those who, so far, have chosen to eat the nectarine.

Image credit: Bust of John Keats. Anne Whitney, marble, 1873.K/AR/01/012.
Image by Elaine Duigenan, 2020, CC-BY-NC-ND.

Wilson maintains that “saying ‘yes’ to a world painful and dark” is central to Keats’s philosophy. It is bound up in his concepts of negative capability and the “vale of soul-making”. And How to Make a Soul is a practice in this art. In this memoir, the author wades through a depression that takes him to sites relevant in Keats’s life– the property in Hampstead where he wrote his odes, the room where he died in Rome, his grave in the Old Protestant Cemetery– and leaves Wilson, fittingly, evoking Keats as if he’s calling on a Greek deity. He conjures him up and attempts to wring out the answers.

Wilson is certainly an apt literary critic and competent biographer, but this book shines brightest in the places where he is most vulnerable about his personal connection to Keats. Take this snippet from his time at Keats’s deathbed in Rome:

“The inconsequential particular torques the heart. For no good reason, I glanced at the floor at the base of the bed, noticed a patch of dust, and into my mind slammed: an image of Keats’s blood-spit splattering this floor.”

From whence spring sudden tears and these reflections:

“The crying wasn’t simple sadness, was by no means joy; more like, a feeling too immense and forceful and confused for my frame to hold. Keats, exuberant poet and robust romancer, bereft of verse and love … now dwindled to bleeding, spitting, vomiting, shitting; large noble soul, generous and funny, reduced …

“Another layer was more self-absorbed: Keats no longer exists, and I need him to, to write about what it’s like to be forty-five, with wife and child, still with aspirations to compose powerfully, and with numbing depression.

“Still other layers, even closer to my bones: I will never approach Keats’s talent …

“And finally, the more general bewildering bliss of vague universals: life is so sad we should end it now; life is so sweet let’s hold to it hard; death brings clarity; dying is meaningless; look at the greatness of suffering honestly embraced; hurting is hurting is hurting …”

I love that Wilson approaches and ultimately pulls away from nihilism, that he experiences his thoughts in a negatively capable (and a death positive) way. He does not shy away from his grief, or say that it is silly, or paint it in one color, or try hide it from us. He discusses it frankly because, if he truly believes Keats’s philosophies, he has to. Experiencing and processing the natural awful is necessary. Any other tact is counterproductive to his development as a human being.

I can picture this scene so clearly; Wilson standing in a creaky, old bedroom over the Spanish steps, staring vacantly at the space where Keats passed through the veil, grasping for something, anything. However, I see a detail that perhaps the author was too busy attempting to sort it all out to notice. Over his shoulder stands a young man; he is slight, diminutive, but he has a big presence. He looks not a day over twenty-five, observant, with curly, reddish-blond hair, and he chews thoughtfully on the nib of a pen. While Wilson cries silently, the poet for which he mourns has a thought. Not unkindly, he smirks– and begins to write.

Book Review: Rebecca

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“In the car going home I sat in my corner, biting my thumb nail, seeing the great hall at Manderley thronged with people … and I could see Maxim standing at the foot of the stairs, laughing, shaking hands, turning to someone who stood by his side, tall and slim, with dark hair … dark hair against a white face, someone whose quick eyes saw to the comfort of her guests, who gave an order over her shoulder to a servant, someone who was never awkward, never without grace, who when she danced left a stab of perfume in the air like a white azalea.”

My partner and I are currently looking for houses. We can’t afford much, but it’s fun to drive around on Sundays and pretend we’re in the market for a real stunner. We’ve pulled over outside many a palatial estate while I briefly wax sentimental about having a library, study, an art room for him, and a music room we don’t even use. I dream about “forever homes” and the work I’ll do to them. In these fantasies, I even own a pair of overalls, in which I paint every room using the color palette I already have picked out. Somehow, I know things about wallpapering and creating mosaic backsplashes over the sink and stove in the kitchen. The home is, of course, a great Victorian with original woodwork and Tiffany light fixtures.

This probably sounds like a great deal of snobbery to you, but I understand my own psychology, and I can tell you it comes from an innocent, if naive place. I remember taking evening walks in my first serious boyfriend’s neighborhood and imagining each house as ours. I was enamored by domesticity, which is not really much of a surprise. When I was growing up, my mother took extremely good care of her house. She had a matching candle for every holiday. She wanted our surroundings to look as much like a soothing fairy tale as possible, and because we effectively lived in a forest preserve, this wasn’t difficult. By the time I was 16, I pretty much felt like a Disney princess.

But the idea of a home that is truly mine has thus far been a fantasy. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I lived in a shitty one bedroom apartment with my shitty ex, too broke from waiting tables to pay even half the rent, and then dragged that misery all the way across the country to the West coast. There, I cleaned the houses of the rich, trying not to gag from the mold in the showers, sneaking an occasional rest in a princess chair, and trying to befriend the household cats, who were possibly more privileged than their owners. Now I live in the crumbling house I’ve always wanted with landlords who are possibly shittier than my ex and I’m in constant fear it will have burned down every time I return from work.

This is all to say that a book that begins with the phrase, “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is almost too personal to write about.

But it’s not just the dream-house motif that often accompanies a Gothic romance that makes this novel nearly undiscussable for me. It’s that the unnamed narrator matches my self-detrimental thought processes turn for turn.

What if, when I finally have it, I’m not good enough for this dream house? What if I am a frumpy, mousy tenant, nowhere near as lustrous and intriguing as the previous owner? What if I am slovenly, cannot manage the way the house is run, cannot keep up with my own business and projects, prove to be incompetent? What if I can’t maintain control over my own life, living space, work space? Worst of all, what if I don’t deserve to be happy on my own terms?

Du Maurier’s narrator suffers from the same generalized anxiety, imposter syndrome, and self-worth issues that many young women do. But without actually getting in her head, her mental illness is just that: a term. Inside her head, we can identify the thought patterns, with just enough coercion from others, that lead her to such a dark place. And it stings like ice. Now approaching 30, I’m growing tired of the same self-sabotage that keeps me from being the best I can be. I’m sick of comparing myself to other women physically, emotionally, intellectually, financially, and finding that I fall short on each count.

But I don’t know that Rebecca offers a solution to these problems. Like the new Mrs. de Winter, I beat myself down to a level of despair that can only be resolved by anger. With this anger comes a brief flare of confidence, during which I accomplish as much as I possibly can; but inevitably, I flail and begin to sink.

I turn the corner, and the dream house is ablaze.

Review: No Stone Unturned

I’m so glad I have a tendency to turn to oldies-but-goodies instead of the shiny, brand new nonfiction. The suggestion for this read came from the aforementioned My Favorite Murder. One of the hosts is an avid reader and mentioned this book often during earlier episodes of the podcast. She claimed she would listen to it on Audible to fall asleep at night.

No, this blog is not sponsored by Audible. Or My Favorite Murder. It’s sponsored by my existence as one of the many people who would also consume this as a bedtime story, and who gets excited about the discovery of adipocere at a grave site instead of normal things.

Luckily, the people featured in this book also get excited about things like that, and they can (and did, and do) put their knowledge and interests to good use instead of blogging into the void about it like I do. Steve Jackson presents the story of NecroSearch International, a group of geophysicists, anthropologists, naturalists, botanists, engineers, geologists, detectives, etc. who have devoted their time and money and emotional labor since the 80’s to research on finding clandestine graves. At the time of this book, now eighteen years ago, they had assisted with 150 cases. Investigators can still contact them for help locating bodies.

No Stone Unturned focuses on five of the most interesting cases with which NecroSearch assisted. The major appeal of this book is the selflessness of NecroSearch’s members, who worked tirelessly to recover remains that would have otherwise probably never been found. In many cases, the offender may not have been convicted in a body-less homicide case. Reading about these people traveling thousands of miles, crawling around on their hands and knees in the middle of nowhere for sometimes twelve hours at a stretch to find nothing but a vertebrae, then carefully excavating remains, standing watch over them, losing sleep, and testifying about their discoveries in court gave me a whole new perspective on these types of investigations. I’m sure we have a wealth of technology to rely on nowadays, but the fact that the organization still exists is a testament to the difficulty of locating a hidden body.

My favorite member of NecroSearch is Diane France, an anthropologist who, while examining the remains of the Romanov family, discovered that one of the skeletons could not have belonged to Anastasia as the Russian government had thought. I don’t know why she, in particular, stood out to me (maybe it’s because I went through a brief stint of idolizing Temperance Brennan, Kathy Reichs’ fictional forensic anthropologist), but I looked forward to her presence in every case. I think Rachel Monroe hit it on the head when she spoke about the “Detective” role in women’s interest in true crime: it sure is a relief to see a woman in control, able to look at horrific scenes and catch a killer with information about a victim’s body. There’s probably nothing more personal than examining the growth plates on someone’s bones; France has a unique connection to the victims both as a woman and a person who can restore their voices in a way that many others can’t.

Overall, I’d like to see an updated version of this book with more current case selections and an overview of how much or little circumstances have changed in the world of forensics since 2002. What is NecroSearch’s place in the world of murder cases in 2020? How is the group received? Do they still split their research and field work evenly, or do they concentrate on one more than another? What current technologies are being employed in their searches? But, besides some cute mentions of DNA’s part in crime scene investigation, I don’t feel the book as a whole has become quaint with age. It’s still, ultimately, a story about people helping other people, confronting difficult emotions, and outwitting killers, which are some of the best qualities about any true crime story.

Review: The Stranger Beside Me

I don’t think pornography caused Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. I think he became addicted to the power his crimes gave him. And I think he wanted to leave us talking about him, debating the wisdom of his words. In that, Ted succeeded magnificently.

Recently, I have roused my boyfriend not once, but twice in the middle of the night to investigate a strange noise in our apartment. I have scolded my mother, who would have been 15 in 1977, for not thinking more about her own safety. I have whacked off all of the long, dark hair I used to part in the middle. I have looked at men I know well with suspicion and fear. And now I am ready to talk about this book– but I don’t know what to say.

This is more than a sketch of a serial killer’s crimes and capture, a tribute to his victims, or a lament of police mistakes. It sings with confusion, alarm, and near anguish. Ann Rule got wrapped up in a terrible coincidence. Among others who were close to Ted Bundy, she had to make choices that no one should ever have to make, and she dealt with confusion and emotional turmoil beyond imagination.

Although Ann was convinced by the bite mark testimony that ultimately sealed Bundy’s fate, we now know that this, like many other forensic tests, is unreliable. Ted has never been linked to a single one of his murders through DNA. Rule adds up the evidence she knows. All of it is circumstantial. It doesn’t seem possible, knowing what she knows about Bundy as a person, that he could have committed these crimes. He saved lives over the phone! He sent her Christmas cards! He even rescued a drowning baby.

I start buying it, too. I sit on my living room floor in a daze, wringing my hands about this and that. The rope. The car. When shown his picture, 7 of the 8 witnesses denied the man they had seen was Ted Bundy. For a while, I remain concerned about the evidence. This gives way to panic about what it means that, even for a second, I could believe Ted Bundy innocent. Because it means something about me, not about Ted.  It means I have the propensity to be manipulated by individuals like Bundy, and, given the chance to help a handsome stranger in a fake arm cast, I could have lost my life. It means I am not safe anywhere in the world because of who I am.

This is what people like Ted Bundy do. They make it your fault.

The realization of this only leads to more distress. You have to ponder the age-old question: Why is the world like this? Why do bad people get away with the bad things they do? More importantly, why are bad people also capable of significant good actions, when, in sum, they cannot actually contribute to other people’s lives in a meaningful, helpful way?

As I type this, I can feel the same ache in my throat that I had while I was reading The Stranger Beside Me and in pretty much all my waking hours until I finished it. That’s the thing about this book: you read the words on the page, but you get out of it so much more than you wanted– and not always in a good way. It’s a Pandora’s box.

I’d hoped for some resolution in the week between moving on to my next book and writing this review. In truth, I’d calmed down a bit, but I didn’t have the answers I needed to sleep better at night. It wasn’t until I shelved this title– right next to I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara’s masterpiece about her obsession with catching the Golden State Killer– that I got it. Upon seeing McNamara’s book, I remembered that she had been troubled about many of the same issues. Her solution?

“It’s chaos. Be kind.”

Review: Posthumous Keats

 

I hesitate to give this a rating at all because I suspect this book was very intimate to its author. It is labeled a “personal biography”; that being said, most writing about Keats’s life is personal in some measure. One can’t help but get attached.

The perspective with which I approached this book may be a good place to begin. I have read three Keats biographies before this (my favorite, Andrew Motion’s Keats, Aileen Ward’s John Keats: The Making of a Poet, and John Evangelist Walsh’s ‘Darkling I Listen’: The Last Days and Death of John Keats, which I reviewed earlier on this blog). I’m more than passingly familiar with Keats, and I’ve consequently developed my own relationship with and reactions to him– his philosophies, mythologies, vulnerabilities, quirks, etc.

Plumly demonstrates a similar familiarity with his subject. His stated intention was “to walk around in Keats’s life and art, not simply through them,” so the book is by no means linear. This lends, in my opinion, both benefits and inadequacies. This method allows the author to exploratorily connect themes in the poet’s life, but I wouldn’t recommend Posthumous Keats to a first-time Keats bio reader. It seems as if Plumly assumes his audience already knows enough about his subject to follow the jumpy narrative, and the narrative is just that– choppy. Reviewers such as PEN commend this quality of the text, asserting that the author “distills what is essential, and then has the wisdom, the instinct, and the courage to let the rest go.” For me, it simply lacks a sense of wholeness.

That’s a shame because Plumly does have a strong connection with Keats. This is felt especially when he meditates (often) on Keats’s death, and this is one of his stated motives in the book. In the preface, he makes the contention that “The power of Keats’s story is so wrapped up in his young, drawn-out, painful death that it is almost impossible to separate that from the power of the poems … they should not be separated, nor should their vital connection be exaggerated.” His warning that he is about to intimately reflect on Keats and death– Keats’s sometimes gruesome medical training, his disease, his thoughts about dying, death in the poems, and Keats’s dead body– without being exploitative or sensationalist about it is so refreshing. It is often difficult to come across frank conversations about death that are not marketed as weird or edgy but simply as another important topic on the spectrum of human experience.

Despite the sensation of incompleteness, this book packs an emotional punch. I believe I’ve located the passage where I began tearing up, again, as I do about three quarters of the way through every Keats biography, and it is here:

“This body that Severn could carry as if it were a child’s from bedroom to living room, this body barely five feet and part of an inch in length, this once robust bantam fighter’s body whose face afire Haydon has so beautifully rendered in his panoramic Jerusalem painting, ‘this mortal body of a thousand days,’ this boy’s body curled as in the womb under his school desk mourning his mother’s death, this body among the bodies at Guy’s at the anatomical demonstrations, the surgeries, and the surgical mistakes, this body open and emptied– this body that you wonder how at the end it held itself and soul together is the body to be borne into what Keats thinks is anonymous ground, his spirit having long since returned to the air.”

Plumly does all this while also admonishing those who would preserve the stereotype, propagated both intentionally and unintentionally by Shelley, Byron, Tory reviewers, and some of Keats’s own circle, of Keats as a fragile flower “whose name was writ in water, and his poems in milk and water.” He fiercely protects Keats while recognizing his faults and also factoring in the unknown, cognizant that the large gap in time, the factors of perspective and personal agenda, and missing documents inhibit the formation of anything more than the idea of a person.

In short, if you are an avid reader of Keats biographies, this is not one you should skip. But if you want to gain as complete a picture as possible before zooming in, start with something else first.

It’s been a while! I took a hiatus from this blog while writing my thesis, but I should have several reviews coming up. Thanks for hanging in there. As you wait for more content, check out a few episodes of Queens of the Damned: A Horror Podcast, including this one, of which I am particularly fond, where we share some of our favorite underrated horror films, and I defend the 2012 adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.

Review: The Exorcist

The Exorcist is almost fifty years old now, but I don’t have an excuse for not reading it sooner than I did; I’ve been alive for more than half that time. I remember my mother telling me how frightening the film was (she was ten on its release date), and I remember seeing the film with a dismissive shrug when I was 19. After so many strides were made in the horror genre, it was hard to view a 1974 film with a fraction of the terror that its contemporary audiences felt.

As a theme, possession just doesn’t get me like it used to. A lot of it has to do with the Christian sensationalism surrounding the subject. These stories are often a way of reinforcing that Christianity is the one true path to salvation and that there are some issues only Jesus can fix, a black and white difference between good and evil that anyone should be able to distinguish. I find this more problematic than frightening. We should have reached a time, by now, when we have a more nuanced view of how the Christian mythos has been used to marginalize and manipulate nonconformers and a better understanding of how concepts like Satan can be used subversively against that harmful rhetoric. I think we’re getting there; shows that reverse the protagonists and antagonists in the Christian narrative, like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, are becoming more and more lauded.

But every couple of years or so, a new possession movie (2018’s was The Possession of Hannah Grace) rolls around to show us that we haven’t quite shaken all that Catholic guilt, and there’s only one way to fix it. In order to be saved, a disappointingly young and attractive priest must tie you to a bed and douse you in holy water while you writhe around and shout some very inventive profanities.

Before I get too attached to that scenario, let me tell you that this is not exactly what you get from The Exorcist. Sure, there’s a young priest and an old priest and lots of vomiting and holy water, but what I like most about this novel is that an explanation is never really given for Regan’s possession. We’re not at all certain whether the exorcism works because she’s actually possessed or whether it’s just autosuggestion. I think this is an incredible way to approach this subject, one that makes it frightening for someone of any religion or lack thereof. The truth is, we just don’t know as much as we’d like to think we do about the human brain, and we’re not really sure to what extent certain functions of the brain may or may not overlap with what we call the paranormal. For example, there’s an exorbitantly frightening documentary about sleep paralysis called “The Nightmare”, which posits that some people just have unwanted access to another dimension. The more you think about it, the less crazy it sounds and the more you marvel at our infinitesimal knowledge of the world.

The Exorcist toys with this uncertainty. Even before it broaches the subject of demonic entities, a sense of unease is established purely through the main characters’ fear and hopelessness about what does (or doesn’t) lie beyond death. It balances out the unreality of possession with a good old-fashioned crime story that addresses whether or not institutions that attempt to gain control over humanity, like the law, can honestly acknowledge inexplicable circumstances.

This novel’s prose is fairly sophisticated for genre fiction, but it is an astonishingly quick read. My one true disappointment is not being able to stop my perception of the film from coloring my experience of the book. I have no idea how I would have reacted to this had I not seen the film first, but I have a feeling it would have found it much more satisfying. I began reading this with a hope that I would be genuinely frightened, but that did not happen. Neither am I one of those people who has seen so many horror films and read so many horror books that I can’t emotionally grasp what’s happening.

Bottom line: If you’re a consumer of horror, it’s best to keep in mind that this book is so entrenched in horror history that it could seem merely foundational to you now; however, I can’t say that for sure. I know people who refuse to watch or read any possession stories but can stomach some of the most gruesome narratives without batting an eye. What’s so interesting about horror is how differently people react to its subgenres.

I’d be interested to hear what your reaction to this novel was, whether you’re a first-time reader, read it long ago, or are revisiting. Has your perception of it changed since your first read? Since you first saw the film? Leave your thoughts below.

Review: The Seance

The most impressive thing about The Seance is its diction. Perhaps someone who’s an expert on Victorian literature might be able to pick up on some inaccuracies, but I absolutely could not tell that this hadn’t been written in the 19th century while I was reading it. That’s not an easy thing for an author to pull off; there are so many historical novels out there that are unconvincing due to the casual or forcedly formal manner of the prose.

This book also follows the layered, epistolary format of the Victorian ghost story, stacking mystery upon mystery as it progresses. If you’re looking for Otranto-like Gothic fiction with old castles, suits of armor, alchemy, mesmerism, family drama, secret passageways, and a complicated will, this is the story you’ve been waiting for. It has that sinister undertone, the sense of the sublime making itself known in subtle ways.

The one warning I would make about The Seance is that it’s not a casual read. It’s an onion-like story, and by the time you reach the inner layer, you can’t remember what the outside looked like when you’re asked to return to it. When I reread it, I did so in two days, and I still couldn’t remember a couple of the characters from the first section because they hadn’t been mentioned in 150 pages. This isn’t to discourage you from picking it up, but it will require your full concentration.

I think this book is rewarding because it takes the neo-Victorian narrative about Spiritualism and fraud, which is so usually focused on women, and makes it about men, their own potential for deception, and what messages that sends about male-centered institutions such as science, religion, and the law. It’s remarkably feminist despite its surface appearance as an authentic attempt at a well-practiced genre, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading Harwood’s other novels, The Asylum and The Ghost Writer.

Review: Affinity

I’ve been in a bit of a literary slump lately, so I recently started rereading the six books I loved enough to use in my thesis. Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is hands-down my favorite Gothic/horror novel, and Affinity doesn’t disappoint.

What I love so much about Sarah Waters is that she understands the genre enough to manipulate it. Her books provide sharp social commentary that bridges the gap between Victorian and contemporary issues, especially those involving class and gender (I would, however, like to see her address race, as she tends to focus only on white issues). Affinity takes a hard look at the charges of fraud and deception that surrounded Spiritualism, the power of the gaze, and the detriment of assuming certain things about people based on the social categories we place them in.

As I’ve become more familiar with neo-Victorian fiction, I’ve started to appreciate the way that a truly masterful piece comments on our inability to truly know history by employing an unreliable narrator and a twist that often reveals this dominant perspective to be, if not horribly inaccurate, at least a smaller portion of reality than we first assumed as readers. What, for example, would the same story look like if told by the maid? What would we find out that might change our opinions about events? As a hopeful future librarian, I think an awareness of these archival silences is so important.

Affinity also has a lot to say about the role of the ghost– this is a classic case of the spirit as a vehicle for expressing raw emotions and desires. It turns on its head the idea of a ghost as insubstantial, weak, or unable to communicate. Although we’re given at least a partial answer, the focus is not on the reality of the ghost as such, but on the fact that the ghost is significant regardless.

But don’t worry if you don’t enjoy academic interpretations of fiction. If you like historical fiction and have a fascination with the Victorian era, Affinity still provides plenty of atmosphere, drama, and intrigue to carry you through. You’ll learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about the bleakness of 19th-century incarceration, and the characters are so real and present. It’s at turns erotic, uncomfortable, beautiful, and hideous, and is a book you will want to revisit at least once.

Review: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

Why didn’t I pick up this book sooner?  I’ve been writing papers about how (albeit fictional) ghost stories are inextricably connected to societal fears and anxieties for what seems like forever now … okay, to be honest, probably only a year. But still!

This read made my devilish little pseudo-skeptic’s heart happy. Dickey addresses how America deals with its numerous tragedies and white guilt by concocting stories of literal hauntings; he deals especially with the treatment of marginalized people in the U.S. As someone who is, put politely, obsessed with this topic, I didn’t think I would really learn anything from this book. I was so wrong! Among my favorite subjects were the gender politics behind the demonizing of Sarah Winchester and the disapproval of the female-dominated Spiritualist movement. If you’re into thanatology as well, Dickey also briefly acknowledges the history of our funerary traditions and our anxieties surrounding the dead body. Fitting, since I recently found out that he’s a member of The Order of the Good Death, a society founded by practicing mortician and death positivity advocate Caitlin Doughty. Its members are scholars, artists, writers, and morticians who work to revolutionize the death industry. Swoon.

His vast exploration of America’s ghost tales is well-organized and interestingly broadens from the domestic sphere to civic hauntings and even cursed cities. This impressed me, since explaining the ghost lore of an entire country is a particularly daunting project, and also helped me compartmentalize the reasons for the generation of stories in different locations. Dickey is clearly a fan of Shirley Jackson and makes multiple sly references to The Haunting of Hill House throughout his book, which I enjoyed as a friendly nod to other haunted-house enthusiasts. At times, certain references took the heaviness out of a text that addresses the horrors of American history.

There was an understandable bitterness in Ghostland, not only toward our exploitation of indigenous people and people of color, but toward the fact that this exploitation can sometimes continue through the way we structure our ghost stories, either omitting the reality of the tragedy because we see it as verboten, or making a buck off of embellishing the gory details of someone else’s suffering. However, at times, the tone came off as looking down on all ghost hunters and legend trippers. We’re not all vandals, and we don’t all believe that everything we see or hear is a ghost! In fact, some of us, like me (and I think like Dickey himself) tend toward disbelief, finding only one or two absolutely inexplicable cases in our lifetimes. I think this was truly what the author was going for, but that point got lost behind the horror of many thrill-seekers’ behavior. If the book was lacking in any area, I wished Dickey would have explored the possibility of people using some types of ghost stories as a positive cultural influence. I think this exists, and I believe legend tripping can have its benefits if done respectfully: it’s how some of us learn to cope with death and mystery, for one thing. And it’s how some of us (again, maybe like Dickey, but I’m mostly talking about myself) cut through the facade of the “this-great-country” speech and get down to the truth of history and the naked acknowledgement of our inner struggles. When it comes to discerning cultural truths, I find ghost lore as transparent as an apparition.

Although this is a history-driven book, it is peppered with some harrowing tales of spirits. It doesn’t matter that Dickey pretty much systematically lays out the legends and subsequently disproves them as mere tall tales– because, as he says, “the ghost is too important” to us. This is a must-read for any fan of horror or the supernatural. Despite their impossibility, these stories still chill.