By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Red Room’ is H. G. Wells’s finest take on the ghost story. The plot of ‘The Red Room’ can be summarised as follows.
Summary
The narrator has gone to spend the night in the red room of Lorraine Castle, which, according to legend, is haunted. The castle is inhabited and curated by a number of elderly people. The narrator is twenty-eight years old and reassures them that it will take a ‘very tangible ghost’ to frighten him.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Subliminal Man’ is a 1963 short story by J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), whose work has variously been categorised as ‘science fiction’, ‘dystopian’, ‘slipstream’, ‘alternative’, and a number of other labels. The story is set in a near-future world in which the population’s consumer habits are controlled by subliminal advertising, delivered via a series of signs that litter the urban landscape.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Esquimos Have No Word for War’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words of analysis about some of her best-known poems seem appropriate.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Moth’ is a short story by the British author H. G. Wells (1866-1946), published in his 1895 collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. The tale might be regarded as a variation on the ‘ambiguous ghost story’ in that we as readers cannot be sure whether the moth in the story is the ghost of the protagonist’s old rival come back to haunt him, or a hallucination which exists only in his overworked brain.