I picked up a book from the library today. An anthology of ghost stories called Post Mortem. I ordered it because I knew there was a story in it by an author I've always liked, one who is no longer with us.
He's not the only such writer in the book. You can tell looking at it that it came out some years ago. To wit it was first published in 1989. The Second World was just starting to crumble. Almost all public buildings had pay phones. I could go on.
At a certain point growing older means becoming something of a ghost yourself: a remnant of a world that isn't there anymore.
2 comments:
I looked up the anthology and wondered if it was Gary Brandner whose story you looked forward to reading. I see he wrote The Howling series and a few other horror genre books that may have caught your interest. Just a guess as it may well have been someone else.
There are definitely many changes since 1989 - no more Soviet Union, no more public phones, no more so many things and, strangest of all, we're all thirty plus years older than we were. Given a choice I'd rather be the age I am now and have the memories of what once was. I see ghosts when I look at people conducting their lives through smartphones.
Charles L. Grant, actually. Brandner's story wasn't bad, but the reveal at the end (of something that was pretty obvious to begin with) could have been handled better. I don't actually know much about him other than having seen the first Howling movie. (There were a lot of them.)
Well it's definitely true that we're all thirty-odd years older. Of course people always got thirty years older, or at least the lucky ones did. It seems to me that there have been more changes in this period, and that these changes have mostly consisted of things--and people--getting uprooted. Maybe that's just my perception, though. Smartphones do have a tendency to make things less solid.
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