Spook House

In an effort to sort of guesstimate how much I actually read for pleasure in a year, I’ve decided to post up a mini-review when I finish something. This may actually convince me to read more by shaming me with how little I manage, but will hopefully give me a quick reference for how many books I’ve gotten through by the end of 2009.

Spook House is a fantastic book made up of short ‘horror’ stories set and written a century ago. The prose style mixes some of Ambrose Bierce’s journalistic background with sharp pacing, Bierce’s wording must have sounded sharp and short to many of his contemporaries. You won’t find many, if any, of these stories translatable to film, the stories are just too short, but Bierce has a way of presenting the tale so it seems more believable in its indescrepancies – there are almost always some secondary questions about each story that go unanswered, but its in these untied threads that the effect of the stories truly lingers in.

You can find quite a lot of Bierce’s work at The Literature Network, including one of my favourites, Chickamauga.