THE ROVING PECKER PRESENTS: Another Spooky Christmastime Tale From Raincoaster!
It's your lucky day...but maybe not Toby Crooke's.
He's dead, you see.
Although inert from the opening of the story, he's the central and titular character of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's complex, charming, and chilling Christmas ghost story, "The Dead Sexton." Le Fanu's lesbian vampire tale, "Carmilla," helped inspire Bram Stoker's "Dracula," and is certainly responsible for the great lashings of sex appeal in most of the Dracula legacy. His style is what people think of as the "classical" ghost story, because he is one of the foundational authors of modern horror. The reason it feels familiar is that every horror author you've ever read has been influenced by him.
Naturally, there's a sexy, supernatural, and mesmerizing character in this story: Satan. For on Christmas Eve, he's come to collect his due. Definitely give Karl Urban this job when it's finally filmed. Must ride horse, swagger, and trade witticisms with terrified townspeople.
As with most of Le Fanu's stories, he lays out the setting with minute attention. In this case, it's the charming but fictional Irish town of Golden Friars, which he reused as often as H. P. Lovecraft used Innsmouth, if a great deal more lovingly. If the setting is cosy, the story is anything but. The author was having fun with this one, and while it's less gruesome than most ghost stories, it's more good, old-fashioned shivery.
Think of it the next time you see a black horse.
Full text here with his other top hits on "Online Literature" are RIGHT HERE.
And here's a DELIGHTFUL PODCAST of it. The narrator practically whispers the story in his plummy RP accent, as if telling the story in bed to his beloved.
Photo Credits: Getty Images, Doug MacCash/NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune
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