Welcome ye night wanderers, ye fumblers in the deep & fear-filled dark. Welcome to the fourth instalment of the interweb's dreadfulest story club.

On the menu (Mmm…) tonight – Edith Wharton's shaggy ghost-dog story "Kerfol".

Though, like many of her contemporaries, Wharton was of the opinion that certain aspects of modernity have proven disagreeable to ghosts (and "the ghostly"), she doesn't wholeheartedly embrace the commonly articulated view (attributed by her to Osbert Sitwell) that "ghosts went out when electricity came in":

"What drives ghosts away is not the aspidistra or the electric cooker; I can imagine them more wistfully haunting a mean house in a dull street than the battlemented castle with its boring stage properties."¹

What the ghost really needs, she tells us, is "not echoing passages and hidden doors behind tapestry, but only continuity and silence". For "where a ghost has once appeared it seems to hanker to appear again; and it obviously prefers the silent hours, when at last the wireless has ceased its jazz".²

This may indeed be true. If it is then it begs questions of our (finished & sequenced) Dreadful Thoughts muxtape. Will the "tape", as I had hoped, add to the spooky atmosphere of our meetings or will it, instead, serve only to deafen the encroaching spirits – driving them scuttling toward the door? Time well tell I suppose – and the latter (potential) result may actually be a bonus depending on the state of your nerves.

But enough. Those of you with club badges – wear 'em. Their mystical properties will either keep you safe from the perils of the otherworld, or damn you for all eternity (I haven't worked out which yet).

Booze (or herbal teas) at the ready? Good…let us begin.

P.S: Club member "Wunderkammer" has created his own dreadful companion to our mixtape. It can be found here. Enjoy.

1. Wharton, Edith The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (London: Virago, 1996), pg. 3. [back]
2. Ibid. [back]

As the first batch of badges make their way to their (un)lucky owners (and the mixtape continues to grow & mutate satisfactorily), Sinéad has announced details of the tale up for discussion at our next Dreadful Thoughts Story Club meeting -

Edith Wharton's "Kerfol" (html), (pdf)

Go read it, make notes, shine up your club badges and let's all meet back here at 9.00 p.m. on Monday, April 21st.¹

Update 14/04/08: Jess & I have done a bit of WordPress upgrading and "Comments Section" polishing. The very first comment you submit will now be moderated – after that you'll be totally unimpeded (and won't have to mess around with anti-spam words etc).² You now have easy options to format your comments too, plus you've half an hour to go back and edit them, after submission, should you so choose.

Finally, I'm trying to establish a decent "Tags" system on the blog. If you click into an individual post you'll now see "Tags" in the sidebar. This is a work in progress as I'm going to have to go back and re-tag every single post…but it should make the archives easier to navigate when completed. Let me know if you spot any bugs, errors, or general annoyances.

1. Changed from 8.00 pm due to public pressure. [back]
2. This shouldn't be an issue for anyone who's commented before. [back]