Ghosts And The Deceptive Lack Of Them In Some Stories.

"We are all haunted houses... full of rooms that time has shut off. To wander sometimes through such rooms can be agonizingly rich and sweet."

I'm livid... slightly (or humorously for the sake of making this blog post a better read). Recently I read 'A Knock At the Manor Gate' by Franz Kafka. It was in a book of ghost stories so it was quite easy to know the type of story that I was expecting. It starts with a young boy and her sister. The sister decides to knock on the door and run away. As they are walking away they see a carriage coming out of the manor that the sister just knocked on. As the carriage comes out of the gate all of the villagers look on terrified. The carriage goes up to the two children and takes them away. The boy is thrown into some sort of prison cell... and the story ends there...

Where the hell was the ghost then?...

Apparently this work is a type of flash fiction... because it's really short... is the thing that can be assumed.

I then read 'The Lilies' by Alison Prince which was in the same short story book than the Manor Gate story. The story is about a young girl who lives with her mother. Their garden is full of all sorts of flowers. The mother has a weird ritual of cutting some flowers down, burying the flower and then putting a small grave over it with the name of the flower carved onto the headstone. One day this arse-y priest comes round saying,
"This is sacrilege... a pagan practice."
The priest then slips, hits his head and is a gonner. The mother tells the young girl to bury the priest in the garden saying,
"Shame to put him to waste."
The young girl buries the priest.
I won't go into too much detail about the rest of the story but their certainly is no ghost in the story.

It's false advertising basically... putting vaguely creepy stories into a short story book that presents itself as a collection of ghost stories. When it says on the cover "Ghost Stories" you expect there to be some form of ghost in every story.

Oh well... I'm only joking... I enjoyed all of the stories in the collection. I absorb stories like cake or toast energy going into the bloodstream... stories are like food and if I don't have enough then I starve... that was  what I was trying to say.

Over and Out.
ED.