Ghost stories are about seeing. If their earnest intention in simplistic terms is to scare, then that fear first and foremost arises from witnessing. Seeing becomes séance in tales of the supernatural. In the history of the literary ghost story, several writers have taken the form to its zenith through terrifying temporal lapses of perception. Those glimpsed stories of M.R. James’s or those witnessed horrors of Charles Dickens; all stories in which the act of seeing becomes the spine of the narrative.
With this in mind, it’s clear to see why several of the strongest ghost stories of the last two hundred years or so have found their way onto screens in various forms. With the act of seeing so pivotal to their narrative arcs, there is an obvious visual quality within them that renders their potential for screen adaptation irresistible. It could almost be argued that the most adapted of writers and their stories are those that convey this visual terror most effectively.
In One Friday in April, the writer Donald Antrim recounts his attempted suicide, subsequent cycles of hospitalization, treatment, and recovery. “I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision, or a wish. I do not understand suicide as a response to pain, or as a message to the living ... I see it as a long illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging,” he states at the outset. With this credo, and in other ways, Antrim announces that we’re about to read a remarkable document of the medicalization of culture. Doctors are of course trained to view every problem through the lens of disease. But what happens when artists do the same?
Aside from writerly hubris, what exactly justifies, in other words, this unwieldy book, which runs nearly 600 pages, breaking Eggers’s made-up rule of maximum length? I’ll show it does two things tech critics like me can’t do, and the absurdists haven’t quite managed either.
As Africa bears the brunt of the Covid pandemic’s severe consequences for safari tourism, resulting in an explosion of poaching caused by the collapse of visitor revenue to support vital wildlife frontline defence, we can look back to a time when journalists and conservationists were putting their lives at risk to highlight the illegal ivory trade wiping out Africa’s elephant herds.
If I’m honest, a foal pulled chest-level
close in the spring heat, his every-which-way
coat reverberating in the wind, feels
akin to what I imagine atonement might