The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

Ghost stories are, as Henry James notes, “the most popular form of the
fairy tale,” and his method of enticing the reader into the fantasy is
to “make the reader’s vision of evil intense enough to supply the
particulars.” Implied here is the idea of vagueness and mystery; in
the best stories, the lack of reasonable explanation contributes to the
charm, and allows the tales to be read on more than one level.

This tales (arranged chronologically by the authors’ dates of birth)
provides a good overview of changing tastes and of the variety of short
fiction dealing with the supernatural. Among the early pieces are
cautionary tales with religious undertones. One of these is the story of
a man who refuses to shelter a lost traveller during a storm. The
traveller, as a result, dies; the miser, haunted by his deed, lives in
purgatory for 50 years before earning his release by welcoming another
wanderer. In Gilbert Parker’s “The Flood,” guilt leads to suicide;
in Duncan Campbell Scott’s “Vengeance Is Mine,” guilt leads to
death, but here, somewhat more mysteriously and supernaturally. In all
these tales, conscience exacts retribution.

In other offerings, humor overrides unearthly events. Stephen
Leacock’s ghost story is about a haunted house in which a man is
purportedly murdered by his relative, Sir Duggam Buggam; the only
witness—the butler, Horrod—is, as his name implies, the real
culprit. And then there’s Robertson Davies’s yarn with the
“punny” title, “Dickens Digested,” in which a graduate student
is so absorbed with Dickens that he loses his sanity and eventually his
life, not so much by ingesting Dickens’s work, as by being digested by
the nineteenth-century novelist.

Among the contemporary contributions are Farley Mowat’s “The Snow
Walker,” based on Native Canadian folklore; and Virgil Burnett’s
provocative narrative of one man’s disturbing and disorienting
encounter with highly independent women, who appear to be almost totally
in control of their lives, but who, as the tale’s title
(“Fallowfields”) implies, are wasting their potential. “As Birds
Bring Forth the Sun,” by Alistair MacLeod, is an intriguing evocation
of the life cycle in which a mysterious grey dog serves as a metaphor
for, among other things, mortality.

Finally, there are good ghosts. Henry James said that “good ghosts .
. . make poor subjects,” but he hadn’t read Kinsella’s “Shoeless
Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa.” Joe is good in the sense that he conveys,
to both the narrator and the reader, the delightful power and
satisfaction of the human imagination.

Alberto Manguel has provided a fine sampling of ghost stories that
should please those interested in them and in the extent and range of
the Canadian contribution to the genre.