Lord Dunsany Review: The Ghosts

One of the downsides to reading library books is that other idiots touch the books before I get a chance to. I look out for traces of bodily fluids and bed bugs but, living in an area with a lukewarm reception to vaccines and personal hygiene, there’s no avoiding the germs. Even worse is the marginalia.

Sometimes you get a margin war where Idiot A writes a comment in a book which is later checked out by Idiot 2 who writes derogatory remarks about A’s comment. Sometimes A checks out the book again and adds another level to the idiocy. Those guys are bad but worst of all are the grammar nuts.

In the second sentence of Lord Dunsany’s story “The Ghosts,” he used the objective pronoun “whom’ when he should have used the subjective “who.” A previous reader took it upon himself to cross out the “m.”

I teach grammar for a living but this crosses the line. Maybe there were special rules in the Irish dialect of 1914 English while writing about the undead. Don’t deface a library book for that.

The story itself is short and simple, befitting a long, rambling introduction. In it, two brothers squabble over the existence of ghosts. The disbelieving brother waits up until ghosts were bound to appear. Sure enough, they did. Not only ghosts but loathsome creatures with them that were their sins.

The sins notice the brother and converge upon him, filling him with urges to commit all sorts of evil, the strongest is to murder his brother.

The skeptic fights back with logic and reason by reciting math equations. SPOILER ALERT–it works.

The concept of sins accompanying dead spirits feels a little like Dante but I’ve never seen it played out like this. In the same way, the ending was a little like T.H. White’s “The Troll” where the narrator’s agnostic father recited a prayer to destroy the titular troll but again Dunsany’s version had a different focus.

I couldn’t tell you the moral of “The Ghosts” if you put a gun to my head. Was it a satire on believer or skeptics? Was it satire at all? I can’t say.

The only thing I can say is not to deface library books even in cases of grammatical mistakes. Maybe that’s the real reason Dunsany put in that “m.”