![]() ![]() Let’s pick one specific place and talk about how you handle it in the book. And that’s the thing I wanted to focus on. And the specific nature of our own history - especially some of the more fraught and unresolved aspects of it - tends to get expressed in ghost stories quite often. ![]() But what is different about America’s history is that it is young, so the ghost stories we’ve accumulated tend to have a different quality and variety than what you find in Europe and Asia. You find ghost stories and haunted houses the world over. Your subtitle includes the phrase “An American History.” Is there something about this country - which is younger than most other Western societies - that gives it a special fascination with ghost stories and haunted houses? Or does it resonate here in a particular way? The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. ![]() Its subtitle is well justified: “An American History in Haunted Places.”ĭickey earned a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Southern California and now lives in Brooklyn he teaches creative writing at National University. Roaming from the Mustang Ranch near Reno, Nevada - a legal brothel in an area dense with tales of prostitutes’ ghosts - to Civil War sites in Shiloh, Tennessee, near the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, the book finds that ghost stories typically reflect the region in which they’re told. Colin Dickey’s new book “Ghostland” tells what seems like the whole story of the nation through a recounting of haunted houses. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |