Seaton's Aunt

[poliphilo]

 Walter de la Mare's Seaton's Aunt is the only fictional ghost story that has ever properly scared me.  I was a teenager and had never encountered such subtlety before. I re-read it last night- and found it's hardly a ghost story at all- but an exercise in unease which gets its effects by implying the existence of a vast hinterland of frightfulness that may not actually exist. There are no ghastly appearances,  no moments of melodrama, just uncertainty- and dread.  The eponymous Aunt is a great fictional monster-  but is she anything more than an unhappy old lady?  Not knowing is so much worse than finding out.

Comments

[cmcmck]

M R James: 'A Warning to the Curious' is genuinely scary as is Dickens':'The Signalman'.

[poliphilo]

I know them, and like them- but no mere fiction has ever affected me the way Seaton's Aunt did.

My very favourite ghost story is Margaret Oliphant's The Library Window.