Originally shorter and met with modest welcome, the book reached exceeding popularity with the soldiers during World War II, and the paperback versions and reprints were widely circulated, shared, devoured, and—ultimately—discarded. It's terribly rare to find a copy these days, and it hs taken me two years to get my hands on a copy via a resourceful SFPL librarian who found a copy via Link Plus (others tried and failed) and I was able to, as a patron of the San Francisco Public Library, request and receive perhaps the sole library copy in California from the California State College, Sonoma.
It is a wonderfully haunting ghost story. I love a good ghost story. I don't like horror, at all, but for some reason I love a good ghost story. I have been taking the book with me on those rare, rare days with "free time" and curling up in the corner of Twin Peaks or a coffee shop and felt completely self-indulgent simply reading a novel for pleasure. However anticipating how scary the book would be, based on reviews of the era, I would not read the book at home, so the ghosts therein could not know where I lived and the liveliness of my surround crowds might prevent them from following me home. Also, I have a hard enough time keeping evening television or movies from thoroughly overtaking my dreams so there is no way I was going to read this just before sleep.
The thing about Link Plus book loans is that check-out time is shorter, you are limited to only one renewal, volumes must be returned to the delivered branch, and must be returned by hand directly to a librarian or circulation clerk. Leisure time for such reading continues to be limited, and I put off starting it, then only was only slowly making my way through it when it was time to renew, and even more suddenly it seemed, time to return. I was less just less than a third of the way through it. Late fees on such volumes are a dollar a day. The book was due yesterday (attempts at online renewal failed), and I dutifully walked back to the lending branch hoping my librarian cred would grant me a reprieve. However, the Presidio branch is closed on Mondays. I returned to today with PeeDee and made my plaintive plea for an extension, and while I bonded with the librarian over shared beloved and despised professors from our mutual library school, noting was to be done. Except for going home, reading the book in a timely fashion, and accepting the dollar-a-day late fee until I was finished. Or return it and check it out again in a couple of weeks, but I was already underway and would rather not have the interim.
So I stayed up tonight and read the book. Well done, and wonderfully spooky, not at all "scary," and delightfully very much of a time and of a place adding an unintentional curious dimension to the narrative. I also found it to be much more of a mystery novel that I anticipated, which was made worse for me having seen the film and therefore knowing the secrets to be revealed well in advance and through hundreds of pages of clues and foreshadowing. Nothing spoils a good mystery like knowing, or guessing, the ending. And based on the breadcrumbs of Miss Macardle, and my own attention to detail and modern cynicism about such things, I'm thinking I would have guessed at the first hint. And I imagine to suggest the suspicions at the first hint to a reader of the time would have made her clutch her pearls.
But all in all, a great story. I recommend reading over viewing, but I am going to see if I can't find a DVD copy to watch again. And I recommend you ask at your local library to see if you can't get your hands on a copy. Just in time for Halloween. Ghostly goodness.
By the way, while walking to the library I noted to PeeDee that the book was due yesterday, and that I wasn't finished yet, and that I was going to have to eat a dollar-a-day late fee.
To which he noted, "So...you are actually a day late, and a dollar short."
Spot on.
Update: Criterion is releasing a restored version with special features on Blu-Ray this October!
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