HOME Shock! Horror!

I have read many collections of Horror Stories with ghost stories included, and collections of Ghost Stories with some horror stories inserted. When the selectors try to excuse their mixing of the two different genres, they inevitably start talking about the supernatural being present in both. They might just a well say that all the stories ever written should be placed in just one category, because they all involve humans!   To decide what makes a ghost story is simple: something that was alive and is now dead, comes back to trouble the living or make its presence felt. I use the word 'something' rather than 'someone', because I have read a story of a computer that continued with its task, despite having a cup of hot coffee spilled into its CPU, and being, effectively, 'brain dead'. I have also written a couple of computer-related ghost stories, myself, in one of which the computer was the ghost.   My own favourite writers of short ghost stories are Sheirdan Le Fanu and M. R. James. I don't think a story that is written with interest in the subject, ever really dates. Le Fanu died in 1873 and James in 1936 and the settings of their stories obviously reflect the period in which they lived, but the flavour of hair-on-end horror which their best stories produces is still potent.   It's a personal feeling of mine, but I feel that the subtle style produces a better and more lingering effect that the sledgehammer style. This applies in particular to horror stories. Just contrast the matter-of fact details, with just the hind of a great horror near the end, of W. R. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, in contrast to all the gore and up-front nastiness of Stephen King's many blockbusters. I enjoy the eerie feeling, but I don't want to be disgusted.   Still, I suppose, ghost stories, by their very nature, cannot be very gross, since there is no actual flesh involved. Again, that may be why they are sometimes so much harder to write than horror stories. Horror stories can call on Vampires, Werewolves, Humans with twisted minds, Reconstructed Humans like Frankenstein's Monster, Demons, Zombies and other kinds of Animated Corpses. Ghost Stories have only Ghosts, people who have died, but whose spirits have remained for all the variety of reasons that make up ghost stories – revenge, love, to right a wrong, because they don't know that they're dead, or simply because they don't know what to do next.   A good ghost story can be horrifying, but bringing ghosts into a horror story will only dilute it. A ghost story is about dead and now, relatively, harmless humans. A horror story is about humans very much alive and capable of the cruelest evil. They are two distinctly different things. Let's keep them separate.