Ghosts, especially hungry ones

Ghosts was kind of where it got started, and that's an obvious one, right?

The most obviously belonging one was When the Ghost Screams: True Stories of Victims Who Haunt by Leslie Rule.

Rule covers several haunted places with short accounts. Often there are not many details, and sometimes that seems to motivate some overwriting. The stories are still pretty interesting, they are told with empathy, and I have seen compensating for a lack of details by overwriting done much worse (most recently in J.B. Fisher's Echo of Distant Water). 

Others were part of other reading lists, but hey, there's "ghost" in the title; let's go for it!

Sadly, most of my complaints are here. 

Again, sometimes you think you have some complaints, but then you find something much worse.

In The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson -- from my pathology list -- it is a really great book, but then in the epilogue he starts wandering all over the place, not sticking the landing. 

However, in Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino -- from my Italy list -- he is wandering around all over the place, finding lots of good information but also bringing in lots of things that seem unrelated and pointless, except maybe you need to know he has been in submarines and knows James Cameron. That did not make the book better.

So I can recommend The Ghost Map, though maybe skipping the epilogue. I cannot recommend Ghosts of Vesuvius.

Now, even if it is not a traditional ghost story, the inclusion of "ghost" in the title probably indicates that there is something about death or haunting. Those two featured massive death from cholera in London and even more massive death from volcanic eruption in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Sometimes just two deaths is enough. The death of his daughter and then his wife sends Neil Peart on the road by motorcycle in Ghost Rider. 

I am always interested in the subject of grief, but this came from a list of rock memoirs where I decided to read six and have currently gotten through four of them.

As it is, even though grief is the motivation for the trip, the book is really more travelogue, especially with what he ate and drank and what the weather was like, and how much he looks down on the other travelers, which I did not love. 

I know he eventually remarried and had another child before dying; I am glad for the healing he had. I am not sure that there is really insight other than that keeping yourself busy could be good. 

I found more insight with similar loss in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, but that could also be personality.

While I was at it, I checked out Ghost Rider Epic Collection: Vol 1 Hell on Wheels I had plans to read other books in the series, but I found it pretty terrible. I know the movie gets razzed a lot, and maybe it was the adaptation, but it could be the material.

Bad choices can drive drama and that's important for ongoing series, but do all of the choices have to be so stupid? 

There was one other comic that came up: Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying. 

It was already mentioned as part of the graphic novel reading for last Asian American Heritage Month:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/08/graphic-novels-for-apahm-2024.html

I saw it mentioned in an article and thought it looked interesting. When I looked it up in the library there were some other results that I had to check out. 

The Hungry Ghost of Rue Orleans by Mary Quattlebaum and Patricia Castelao

Bob's Hungry Ghost by Geneviève Côté 

The Hungry Ghost by H.S. Norup

Technically these are all for younger readers, with the first two being children's books and Norup's book being for middle grades.

Bob's Hungry Ghost is the cuter of the two children's books, though both are fine and neither is too scary. Ultimately both are about adjusting to new situations, with initial reactions consisting of either eating everything or sulking (but in a restaurant). 

Emotional regulation is important.

For the older books, the hunger is a little less benign. 

In Ying's work, Valerie has an eating disorder that is tightly bound to her mother, but it doesn't really make the mother a villain either. There is a journey to hard realizations. There is a death -- of Valerie's father -- making some things harder, but all of the haunting comes from the living.

Norup's book has an actual ghost. Fortunately, Freja -- recently arriving in Singapore from Denmark -- finds people who can tell her more about ghosts, including that such a young ghost will more likely be hungry from having missed out on so much in life. As many mysteries as there are about this ghost's life and death, Freja has mysteries of her own, and grief that she still has to face.

Those two were completely different books, but both worked for what they were.