Three Ghost Stories

About the book

This collection contains The Haunted House, The Trial for Murder, and The Signal-Man. Each makes an apparently ordinary setting available to experiences that resist a straightforward explanation. A house becomes an occasion for examining expectation and memory; a trial introduces a disturbing relation between visible evidence and another kind of presence; a railway signalman's account gives warnings an urgency that understanding cannot easily satisfy. Dickens varies the tone rather than repeating one formula of haunting, moving between conversational curiosity and concentrated dread. The stories are especially attentive to how a witness communicates an experience and how a listener responds. Their shared interest lies in the gap between receiving information and knowing what can be done with it, a gap made unsettling when the possible consequences feel immediate.

• Uncertainty
• Memory and warning
• Witnessing

Why read it

For three different uses of the supernatural, culminating in the tightly controlled railway unease of The Signal-Man.

Three-story collection · English text