My Lonely City

I asked my cousins, one night they spent with us, if they’d like one more bedtime story before they went to sleep. Of course they said yes, and the older girl asked me to read aloud a chapter from a book she’s been reading. It’s one of the Scary Monsters Don’t Do This or That series – I had one when I was young called Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots, which was actually pretty good. This one was Ghosts Don’t Eat Potato Chips.

Break for literary nerdiness: I recently re-read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which is in many ways a satire on the Gothic novel. In it, the main character, who has read rather a lot of Gothic novels, is led, or rather pleased, to imagine that her friends’ father has murdered or imprisoned his wife who died of a sickness some years before. This conjecture, and her other romantic flights of fancy, not only lead her to behave imprudently, though with no lasting ill effect, but they also prevent her from perceiving the true character of those with whom she deals before that character is brought up forcefully before her attention. This same conflict – between the imagined and the real, the fanciful and the present – informs the Ghosts Don’t Eat Potato Chips book and series. The main characters are staying at a – rather verbally abusive, it seemed in the chapter I read – relative’s house, and think the ghost of her long-dead husband is living in the attic. Of course it will turn out to be someone fairly innocuous, and everyone will laugh about how silly the kids were for being so carried away. And then life will go on, until the next book. No point, just some fun comparisons.