Monday 14 October 2013

All About Ghosts

This is my countdown to Halloween post. I am pluging here a rather bad book, All About Ghosts. I bought it in a French translation back in the 80s. I said it is a bad one and I am even tempted to say that it has no education value whatsoever. Which is why it is a bad book: it is basically is a children's guide to the paranormal. There was some chapters about how people faked hauntings, but overall it was a pure embrace of supernatural explanations for unexplained phenomenons. I didn't develop my critical thinking reading it. That said, I can't help loving it and I still enjoy reading it.

There are two reasons for this: 1)the images. Oh gosh the images! Beautiful, eerie, scary, they were a source of inspiration for many games of our childhood. 2)with all its flaws, it still taught me a few things about ghostly folklore, superstitions, legends and more particularly British folklore, superstitions and legends. You can find more art and more about the book on this blog. If you want to write horror fiction (say someone invites you to write one), I would actually recommend to have this work on your bookshelves.

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