SOURCE: Banville, John. “The Un-Heimlich Maneuver.” New York Review of Books 42, no. 2 (2 February 1995): 25-7.

In the following excerpt, Banville offers a mixed assessment of Women and Ghosts, which he finds characteristically well-written despite its uneven weight and interest.

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Why do we find ghost stories more pleasurable than frightening? Perhaps because they lull us into a state of coziness by turning our worst fears into the stuff of entertainment. In the ghost story the terrors of childhood and of mankind's primitive past are transformed into a kind of joke—a jest, or gest. As in all jokes, however, there is in this process an element of the scandalous. In his essay “The ‘Uncanny,’”¹ Freud cites Schelling's definition of the word: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have...