Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

The Little Stranger

I finally decided what book I'm going to listen to this month: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. I wasn't wowed by her early novels, but I thought The Night Watch was excellent, really excellent. Waters has an article about the story behind her story in today's Guardian. It's a ghost story.

Waters also includes a list of her top ten ghost stories. ooh listy.

bold=have read (and I liked all these I have read, I think it's a good list)

The Monkey's Paw by WW Jacobs
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Beloved by Toni Morrison


I must read 'Hill House' and I find it hard to believe I still haven't read The Turn of the Screw.

Waters says 'Watching a BBC adaptation of (The Woman In Black) several Christmases ago, I got so frightened, I was sick. Admittedly, I had eaten a lot of Christmas pudding - but Hill's story is terrifying, a classic of the genre. The "woman with the wasted face", made so malevolent by the loss of her own infant that she destroys the children of others, is a fantastic creation.'

I remember watching it too; it was first shown in 1990, and it bloody terrified me.
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  • Phew what a scorcher

    I see Gove has backed down on climate change and it's back in the curriculum again.

  • GCSE Computer Science

    My book is now for sale

  • LJ Settings

    At the moment I have set up this journal so that only friends can comment. I hate doing this, but I was just getting too much Russian spam.