Some leaves of delicious terror

Vikrant Parmar

There has been something eerie about libraries since these came into existence. The typical smell that pervades inside them has often goaded the imagination of storytellers and invariably led them to the world of ghosts, ghouls and spirits. Page by page, men of letters have written treasure troves that scare and amaze at the same time. The Haunted Library, a compendium of ghost stories selected by Tanya Kirk from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, expectedly sends a chill down the spine. The 12 stories, which having been penned by the best ghost story writers of yore, have one common fulcrum — a library. So, whether the action takes place inside it or revolves around it, the omniscient library forms the core of each story.  

The first sentence of the opening story, Afterward by Edith Wharton, goes, ‘Oh there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it’, which hints at the presence of unearthly beings all around us; a young couple who move into a country house is told that the place is ‘haunted’, something which excites them. However, by the end, it all changes – ‘you won’t know till long, long afterward’. The Tractate Middoth by MR James is about the search for a missing will, which holds the secret to a manor. In Bone to Bone by E.G. Swain, a book in a man’s private library repeatedly leads him to the garden — ‘at dead of night he left the house and passed into the solitude of the garden’. 

In The Whisperers by Algernon Blackwood, a person who sleeps in a friend’s house surrounded by books hears voices at night – ‘the mind chokes, imagination grows congested’. Fingers of a Hand by H.D. Everett is about two women, who, along with their nephews and nieces, are out on a holiday by the sea, where they get written messages that ask them to leave the cottage they had hired for stay. The Nature of the Evidence by May Sinclair is the tale of a man whose wife, before dying, allows him to remarry. The new wife hates the library of the house, but later realises that it is haunted by the first one’s spirit. Mr Tallent’s Ghost by Mary Webb is about a publisher haunted by a writer he didn’t publish, while in The Lost Tragedy by Denis Mackail, a man does all he can ‘to prevent the rediscovery of less-than-classic book’. The Book by Margaret Irwin narrates the story of a man who, in his library, finds a book that has a malicious effect on him. 

The Apple Tree by Elizabeth Bowen is about a middle-aged man who marries a teenager, only to find that all does not turn out well. Herodes Redivivus by A.N.L. Munby is the tale of someone who finds a book at a friend’s library that had scared him years ago. The last story in this volume, The Work of Evil by William Croft Dickinson, is ‘a warning to librarians everywhere who try to make their collections more accessible’. 

‘You never feel totally alone’, a line in the introduction written by Kirk pretty much sums up the collection, while one of the master storytellers says, ‘No life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen’. True!