Issue 21: The Haunting of Hey, Kid!
Hey there!
We couldn’t have planned it better if we tried–both of the pieces of media covered in the February issue are about ghosts. Real ones, not the ghosts of trauma and history. (Although we are former English majors, so there will always be at least some discussion of the ghosts of trauma and history.) Alex writes about the child spirits in M.R. James’s “Lost Hearts” and its TV adaptation, and Claudia thinks about the melancholy sweetness of Oliver Jeffers’s There’s a Ghost in This House.
Alex on “Lost Hearts”
In “Lost Hearts,” M.R. James’ supremely spooky ghost story adapted into a supremely spooky episode of the BBC anthology series A Ghost Story for Christmas in 1973, there’s nothing creepier than a murdered child and nothing scarier than a power-hungry adult. Though the vengeful spirits Phoebe and Giovanni infuse “Lost Hearts” with a dim, misty atmosphere of creeping dread, it’s the occultist Mr. Abney who fills the story with real horror and danger. Most ghost stories grow out of a buried injustice. “Lost Hearts” is all about the injustices adults inflict on children.
Being a classic British ghost story, “Lost Hearts” serves up heaping helpings of class and colonialism, too. It links the mistreatment of its (white, upper-class) protagonist with the marginalization of its lower-class, “foreign” specters through their shared helplessness. To his uncle, Stephen is just as expendable as Phoebe and Giovanni, orphans whom Mr. Abney has already murdered without “occasioning a sensible gap in society.” Though he presents as a harmless eccentric, Mr. Abney is sophisticated enough to understand that the kids he takes won’t be missed.
Pitch-black observations on 19th century British society aside, the story moves along at a punchy, delightfully eerie pace. Stephen arrives at Mr. Abney’s secluded manor; Stephen spots deep scratches on his bedroom door and something with a “faint and dreadful smile” in the bathtub; Stephen learns the truth about Mr. Abney’s plans for him. Stephen is, more or less, the story’s viewpoint character, but he isn’t the protagonist.
Phoebe and Giovanni are the protagonists of “Lost Hearts,” especially in the TV adaptation , where they are much more constant, dynamic presences. In the story, Stephen spots them from afar or through windows—they’re faint, speechless, and corpse-like. Onscreen, they’re present from the very first scene, watching Stephen approach his new home. Besides the scratches and sightings, they make contact through eerie chants on the wind (“Hai! Hai!”) and creepy hurdy-gurdy music. Their warnings don’t empower Stephen to save himself, though. In the episode’s climax, which swaps James’ understated ending for obvious scares and gore, Phoebe and Giovanni come after Mr. Abney themselves, impaling him with the knife he’d have used to kill Stephen.
I wouldn’t say that “Lost Hearts” is very self-aware about its undertones of class and colonialism, either in its 1890s or 1970s incarnations. That doesn’t make those undertones any less fascinating, though, and there’s something both razor-sharp and moving in the fact that in death Phoebe and Giovanni have a power and agency that they never got to enjoy in life–an agency that Stephen, for all his wealth and higher status, lacks. Their main goal is vengeance, but along the way they save Stephen. In the episode, his connection with the ghosts goes on even after Mr. Abney’s death: Phoebe and Giovanni are also present at the funeral, though only Stephen can see them. And even though it’s a reading that the story doesn’t quite earn, I can’t help but see this as pointing towards Stephen’s new awareness of the gaps and dangers in society he’s been able to overlook before. Phoebe and Giovanni saw underneath respectability and to the rot beneath—now, so does Stephen.
Claudia on There’s a Ghost in This House
When I started thinking about covering Oliver Jeffers’s mixed media picture book There’s a Ghost in This House, I realized that it would be only the second time I’d written about a picture book, in Hey, Kid! or anywhere else. Part of that is because I read far fewer picture books than I do middle grade titles, and the other part is because I’m afraid. Picture books, by their very nature, rely on brief texts and visuals, and taking those apart can seem pretentious. I don’t want to sap the books of their joy by over-explaining, especially when the main point of a picture book is often not even to lay out a traditional plot, but to capture a mood or feeling. The result is that this piece may be less analytical than some of my others. Instead of putting forth a particular argument, I want to discuss the images and implications of There’s a Ghost and why they affected me so deeply.
A little girl with blue hair and neon-green striped dress lives in an old house made up of antique photographs and line drawings. She has no parents, but she’s not alone—maybe. Even though she’s heard that “there’s a GHOST in this house!” she says that “I haven’t found one. I’m not even sure what a ghost looks like.” Readers can see what she can’t, though, with the aid of semi-transparent pages that transpose bedsheet-style ghosts in the house’s nooks and corners.
These aren’t frightening ghosts at all—curious and adventurous maybe, but not scary. They swing from chandeliers and make faces in mirrors. They live side-by-side with the girl, and seem to be much more aware of her than she is of them. On one page, a ghost wrapped in chains clanks through the hallway, and the next illustration shows it giggling in a doorway when the girl turns around to look. They’re able to comprehend her enough to play tricks, while she’s left with noises she can’t explain, but no hard evidence. “I’ve lived here a long time,” the book ends, “and I’ve never once seen a ghost. Perhaps I never will.”
There are a few reasons that this resonates with me. On one level, there’s sympathy. The girl doesn’t have any parents or visitors and she seems so lonely—why else would she be seeking out the ghosts? That’s a very surface-level reaction, though, and I don’t like how adult it makes me feel, like my sense of adventure and fun has been swallowed by thoughts of school and CPS.
Empathy is more interesting. For the last few years, I’ve lived in a house that was built in the nineteenth century. The only noises I hear are what you’d expect from an old building that now houses three rambunctious cats, but I’m still aware of a history I can’t quite reach. Families lived here before my roommates and I, used the bricked-up fireplaces and the locked-up attic. Even if I did the research and found out who they were, what the house meant to them and how they felt when they lived here would still be alien to me.
So I’ll never see a ghost either, because there are some things outside of our grasp. And that’s okay. When I was little, I remember looking in the windows of other cars when I was driving with my family, and realizing that other drivers had completely separate lives from mine that would continue after they passed us on the highway. It gave me a shiver that was at least half excitement. I rediscovered some of that shiver reading and thinking about There’s a Ghost in This House.
Thanks for joining us for another issue. See you next month, and thanks for reading!
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia