How Fear Departed the Long Gallery: A Ghost Story for Christmas by E.F. Benson
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is the gentlest treatment of the hauntings i’ve come across so far in reading through seth’s ghost stories for christmas series: a thickly-haunted house whose ghosts are all departed family members, and treated as such – as familiar visitors greeted and acknowledged by the family and any non-ghostly guests whose paths they might cross.
many of these ghosts were morally iffy when alive, but quite harmless in death and the afterlife; their sins are buried ledes made almost charming by the passage of time, and recounted as such:
I forget the details of great-great-grandmamma Bridget, but she certainly cut the throat of some distant relation before she disembowelled herself with the axe that had been used at Agincourt. Before that she had led a very sultry life, crammed with amazing incident.
there is one exception. two exceptions. in the titular long gallery, after sunset, one might encounter the apparitions of a pair of twins – toddlers horribly murdered by their uncle way back during the elizabethan era, to the family’s great shame. and all who have seen these twins have died ‘either speedily or terribly, or with both speed and terror…’
this story is ultimately one of love and redemption and courage and understanding and fuzzy feelings sure to make the yuletide gay*, but to me (being me and having been put together all wrong), it is the scariest one of all.
twins are scary enough
twins who are also ghosts are worse
twins who are also ghosts with a reputation of killing speedily/terribly?
take that shit walking, benson!
mission statement copied from my review for One Who Saw:
this holiday season, i am going to read through ‘seth’s christmas ghost stories’ line on biblioasis, and i encourage you to do the same. the books are so cute and tiny, you can stuff someone’s stocking or dreidel with ’em! the cover art and interior illustrations are by seth, and they are seasonally spoooooky, blending the spirit of halloween with christmas cheer the way nature, and jack skellington, intended.
6 more to go!
*which is only a spoiler if you haven’t read the title
