True Irish Ghost Stories
Compiled by St. John D Seymour, B.D., Litt. D. and Harry L Neligan D.I.R.I.C Book Review by Miranda Moses (Fraser) ISBN: 978-1-4351-1793-8 I want to start by saying that I categorized this under "nonfiction" because that it what the author is claiming to be giving us. Whether or not these are all true stories is up in the air. I hope that the people telling these stories at least believe in them, but there's always some room for skepticism. And I am a person who has experienced paranormal activity and do believe in otherworldly things, so understand that I'm not saying that to be mean. I was really intrigued by the overall concept of the book when I first saw it. I mean I love Ireland (I'm proud of my heritage) and I believe in/enjoy these kind of topics. But how did the book hold up? First of all, this book is rather old. It was first published in 1914, and the language and writing style definitely reflects that. Honestly, at times it was a little difficult to read. Part of that is simply the way the stories are told another part is the way he blocked names. The books background is that the author decided to put ads out all over Ireland asking people to tell him their personal paranormal experiences. And he received hundreds of stories but a lot of these people did not wish to be publicly identified. So he would cut off the name like "D-" or "Mr. -" Which is fine, and makes sense, unless they also wanted other names censored and then you have a whole paragraph with names like that on top of the older language. It could be very confusing at times. It honestly would have made more sense to me if he had simply changed the names and put a disclaimer at the beginning of the story that some names were changed for privacy. Secondly, this is a very slow read. It's not a fast paced horror genre or an edge of your seat kind of story experience. These are small paragraphs on top of other paragraphs of people explaining their scares. Most of which are very similar, making the outrageous ones REALLY feel exciting, but otherwise they kind of blend together. Though he does have the book sectioned off into categories. These are either by region or by experience. For instance you have "Haunted Houses" followed by an area of Ireland these stories are coming from, or "Poltergeists", "Banshees and other Death Warnings", "Mistaken Identity" etc. With that being said if you're looking for a particular kind of ghost story it may be convenient for you to simply go to that section of the book. I for one was excited for the poltergeists and banshees. In conclusion, this is not a book for everyone. In fact when I was getting the Goodreads information on the book I could see from the reviews that many people felt the same way I did. It was too long and slow of a read or the language held the stories back. I couldn't help but feel like this was a boring read but would probably make for a great tv show where they have someone telling the story and then a reenactment of the story happening- like those ER dramas. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else. But despite it being my least favorite out of this Halloween Book Review Series, I did enjoy parts of it and recommend you look into yourself. As always links to the author's pages can be found down below. Read on my fellow book worms, may we one day have Belle's Library.
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October 2020
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