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Ghosts and Hauntings

Literary ghosts don't rattle chains; they carry unfinished business: revenge, guilt, history. Six hauntings from the battlements of Elsinore to a Mississippi highway, each one insisting the past isn't done with anyone yet.

  1. Cover of Hamlet
    Hamlet

    William Shakespeare · 1601

    Lvl 6150pp

    The canon's ur-ghost: a dead father with a demand, and the template for every haunting that means something.

  2. Cover of The Turn of the Screw
    The Turn of the Screw

    Henry James · 1898

    Lvl 7128pp

    James engineers the perfect ambiguity: ghosts, or a governess's mind? Critics have fought for a century; you'll pick a side by page fifty.

  3. Cover of The Haunting of Hill House
    The Haunting of Hill House

    Shirley Jackson · 1959

    Lvl 5246pp

    Jackson's house may not be haunted at all: the finest haunted-house novel ever written keeps every horror inside its guests.

  4. Cover of Sing, Unburied, Sing
    Sing, Unburied, Sing

    Jesmyn Ward · 2017

    Lvl 5285pp

    Ward's ghost rides in the back seat: a boy dead at Parchman Farm, haunting a road trip through the living South's unfinished history.

  5. Cover of Pedro Páramo
    Pedro Páramo

    Juan Rulfo · 1955

    Lvl 7124pp

    The haunting scaled up to a whole town: every voice in Comala is dead, and it takes half the book to realize whose company you're in.

  6. Cover of Beloved
    Beloved

    Toni Morrison · 1987

    Lvl 8324pp

    The capstone: a murdered daughter made flesh; the ghost story rebuilt to carry slavery's whole unlaid past.