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– THE WRONG TURNING – Excursions into dangerous mental territory often start with something like that. As James says in one of the stories included here, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, experto crede – ‘believe one who has experience of this.’ That flash of personal detail, rare in James’s stories, has led some to infer that the author himself had encountered appalling supernatural events like those he describes so vividly. But James always denied it, and I believe him. The experience I think he alludes to is the mental state itself: terror, painfully heightened awareness (hypervigilance, as the specialists put it) and dreadful imaginings – halfwaking nightmares beyond the conscious control of the sufferer. I have experienced the same kind of thing myself at times when I’ve sensed, however falteringly, however unwillingly, that I too was contending with something that occupied the haunted corridors of my own brain: something too dreadful to be faced directly. It’s striking how many of the finest, subtlest ghost stories leave open the question of whether the ‘ghost’ is best understood as an objective or a subjective horror – Emily Dickinson’s ‘superior spectre’. Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw springs to mind, followed speedily and stealthily by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s taut little masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper. Penelope’s Lively’s Black Dog poses the same question, but the other way round: initially it seems likely that the disturbance is ‘all in the mind’; but could it actually be objectively real – or is there another, still more 4
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– Introduction – challenging way of looking at it? The best ghost stories often leave the reader with questions like that, questions which, however plausibly they may be answered, only lead to more questions: in Dickinson’s words, ‘a superior spectre – Or More – ’? Therein lies the big difference between the ghost story and the other great English-language mystery genre, the detective story. Many detective stories start by creating a sense of the uncanny, so much so that we may at first believe there really is an element of the supernatural – think of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, or any number of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. Then the detective gets to work; reason is applied and finally light is shone into those dark corners. Bewildering, frightening events are explained and set in order – think how many of these expertly engineered tales end with the triumphant sleuth laying it all out in clear narrative form to an enthralled audience. The rational mind – what Poirot famously called his ‘little grey cells’ – has triumphed. Great ghost stories rarely start by springing the traumatic event upon us; more usually they build up to it steadily, carefully, though we may sense early on that something is seriously amiss, even – perhaps especially – when the scene set before us at the outset appears comfortable, predictable, everyday. It can be solid, orderly and well-lit as Mr. Dunning’s British Museum, or cosy as the family fireside setting where W. W. Jacobs’s 5

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– THE WRONG TURNING –

Excursions into dangerous mental territory often start with something like that. As James says in one of the stories included here, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, experto crede – ‘believe one who has experience of this.’ That flash of personal detail, rare in James’s stories, has led some to infer that the author himself had encountered appalling supernatural events like those he describes so vividly. But James always denied it, and I believe him. The experience I think he alludes to is the mental state itself: terror, painfully heightened awareness (hypervigilance, as the specialists put it) and dreadful imaginings – halfwaking nightmares beyond the conscious control of the sufferer. I have experienced the same kind of thing myself at times when I’ve sensed, however falteringly, however unwillingly, that I too was contending with something that occupied the haunted corridors of my own brain: something too dreadful to be faced directly. It’s striking how many of the finest, subtlest ghost stories leave open the question of whether the ‘ghost’ is best understood as an objective or a subjective horror – Emily Dickinson’s ‘superior spectre’. Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw springs to mind, followed speedily and stealthily by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s taut little masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper. Penelope’s Lively’s Black Dog poses the same question, but the other way round: initially it seems likely that the disturbance is ‘all in the mind’; but could it actually be objectively real – or is there another, still more

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