ghosts, sport, libraries and hand grenades
Mar. 1st, 2009 04:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilence posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
I think I’ve just discovered a whole new sub-genre, the sports horror story. I think it's a sub-genre consisting of just a single story! The story being Richard Marsh’s The Fifteenth Man, a ghost story dating from 1900 that takes place entirely on a rugby field during a rugby match. Marsh is better known as the author of the bizarre supernatural mystery The Beetle, and his other claim to fame is that he was Robert Aickman’s grandfather. The Fifteenth Man isn’t a great story, but The Beetle is wonderfully bizarre and is well worth reading.
I’ve been reading other ghost stories as well including Daniel Defoe’s tale The Ghost in All the Rooms, dating from 1727. And it may well be the only ghost story ever written involving hand grenades.
Compared to those two stories A. M. Burrage’s I’m Sure It Was No. 31 seems disappointingly straightforward, although Burrage was actually a fine writer of supernatural fiction. It was his last published story, appearing in 1956. Algernon Blackwood was an ever better writer of such tales, but The Whisperers is not of one of his best. It does qualify as a library ghost story though, so maybe that’s another new genre I’ve uncovered. And it’s by no means a bad story.
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dfordoom)I think I’ve just discovered a whole new sub-genre, the sports horror story. I think it's a sub-genre consisting of just a single story! The story being Richard Marsh’s The Fifteenth Man, a ghost story dating from 1900 that takes place entirely on a rugby field during a rugby match. Marsh is better known as the author of the bizarre supernatural mystery The Beetle, and his other claim to fame is that he was Robert Aickman’s grandfather. The Fifteenth Man isn’t a great story, but The Beetle is wonderfully bizarre and is well worth reading.
I’ve been reading other ghost stories as well including Daniel Defoe’s tale The Ghost in All the Rooms, dating from 1727. And it may well be the only ghost story ever written involving hand grenades.
Compared to those two stories A. M. Burrage’s I’m Sure It Was No. 31 seems disappointingly straightforward, although Burrage was actually a fine writer of supernatural fiction. It was his last published story, appearing in 1956. Algernon Blackwood was an ever better writer of such tales, but The Whisperers is not of one of his best. It does qualify as a library ghost story though, so maybe that’s another new genre I’ve uncovered. And it’s by no means a bad story.
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