Technique Boo-sday #8: The Ghost Story Ingredient List, Pt.3

Tricks, Templates, & Tools

For a general user’s guide to these technique Tuesday posts, please refer back to Technique Tuesday #1 from a few months back. But this month, I’m devoting these Tuesdays specifically to the ghost/horror story, and so I’ll repost last week’s user’s guide to that here. For today’s new post, scroll down below the photo.

Here’s the reprinted user’s guide:

I’m using this month’s Tuesday posts to laying out the ingredients I always have at the ready when I set out to haunt. Please note that I am using the phrase ingredient list, not recipe. That is, I use most or all of these things every time I construct a spectral tale, and so do the writers of almost every spectral tale I love.

But how much of each? In what combinations or order? I’m afraid I’m going to leave that to you.

Not because I’m being coy.

Not because I’m conscious of the power of this spell (although it is a spell, and it does have power, and let’s be honest, I don’t really know most of you, do I?).

Not because I’m holding out in the hopes that a few more of you will find these posts so helpful that you’ll want to upgrade to a paid subscription (although I’d very much appreciate that).

Nope. I’m not going to tell you the precise proportions or combinations because I can’t. No one can.

Think of this as the Technical Challenge on The Great British Baking Show. You ‘ll find a lot of what you’ll need here. But what you do with it, and how liberally you sprinkle each thing…well, that’s to taste. Use wisely.

Or wildly.

I’ll be offering two new ingredients each week this month. In honor of the season.

Technique Boo-sday: The Ghost Story Ingredient List, Pt. 3

(note— I’m continuing my numbering from the beginning of this series. Refer to this month’s earlier Boo-sday posts for ingredients #1-4. This will be my final set for this year, but maybe I’ll make this a new Halloween tradition, and add to the list next October. Depends, really, on your interest and support…)

5. Threshold Crossings

As M.R. James,, justifiably celebrated as the father of the modern ghost story, repeatedly noted (and practiced), the most effective scary fiction tends to happen in a world and time very like the writer’s own. The more familiar the landscape and the characters’ reactions to it, the more credible the unease when it comes creeping.

But I would argue that when it does come, it should be from…out there. Or at least over there. From somewhere else.

Unless we go to it.

Which is why, in almost every great ghostly tale, there is an actual, physical moment where we cross out of the world we think we know— the one where little of the spectral or supernatural seems possible— into somewhere just adjacent, right next door. Where, suddenly, it does.

There are the obvious destinations, sure:

The abandoned dwelling at the end of the block (e.g., the Meyers house in Halloween, Hill House, the Marsden house). The “lonesome places,” as August Dereleth puts it in his beautiful, under-acknowledged story of that name, which are in every city, every town. “If you were out in the evenings, in the night, you would know about them.” The places you unconsciously speed up to pass. Except for the night you don’t…

Then there are the woods. The hillsides and cemeteries, untrodden beaches or caves. Places where we walk alone. Except, as per Shirley J., for whatever else walks there alone.

But your threshold doesn’t have to be anywhere far. Doesn’t have to be outside your own home. It can be down in your cellar (as in the terrifying room where the title character’s wife— and something else— waits to scare kids on their annual Halloween Walk in John Langan’s “Kore,” from his terrific new Corpsemouth collection, or the awful crawlspace in Nathan Ballingrud’s “Sunbleached”). Or it can be in your closet, the door to which you left half-closed. Or in the yard. In the corner where the moonlight folds shadows into the blanket you left draped over the chair. In the fireplace in the corner in “The Chimney”, one of Ramsey Campbell’s towering masterpieces.

It can even be inside you. Down in your dreams, say, a la Nightmare on Elm Street.

Doesn’t matter where you put your somewhere else. What matters is that there should be a specific instant in which we slip into the physical or mental space where certainty dissolves. Because that’s where the ghost story’s wonders and horrors lurk.

6. It’s Not About the Twist

Or, in the parlance of this list: treat twists as garnish.

Look, they can be great. Spectacularly memorable when they work.

That impossible moment in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None— a ghost story of the highest order, even though there are no ghosts—when you realize…well, no, I won’t. But it’s still so good.

Or the masterful way Edith Wharton pays off her own promise, at the beginning of “Afterward”, a ghost story a hundred years ahead of its time, its creepiness deriving from its lack of elsewhere-ness, its mundanity of atmosphere. There is indeed a ghost, the couple at the heart of the story are promised as they take up residence in a decaying country house devoid of menace. But they won’t realize they’ve met it, they’re told. Not until long afterward…

Sure, twists can work. But they’re hard. And the good ones are rare. And if you employ or rely on them consistently, their impact diminishes, because your readers expect them.

And also, even when they do work, they’re punchlines. Magic tricks. Meaning, non-repeatable, at least in terms of impact. Which is why I would argue that while both of the above pieces turn on twists of astonishing ingenuity, those twists are almost irrelevant to their lasting significance.

I return to And Then There Were None because of those cliffs. That island. That house. Those rooms. That shed outside in the storm. Thresholds to terror and wonder everywhere you turn. You can’t avoid them even by sitting still.

I return to “Afterward” for the delicious eeriness— the “pleasing terror,” as per M.R. James— of ordinary days in that falling-down house. The gentle, almost sweet creep of permanent grief. The realization that we all cross thresholds into a world of possible wonder every time we open our eyes and wake.