This collection of strange stories selected by Roald Dahl can be said to be a collection of ghost stories. Ghosts always make people fearful. The English name of the book is Feather, Chinese translated as "Strange Stories", less fear, more curiosity. Although the title is Called Feer, it is not a blind sensory stimulation like the ghost stories of stall literature, and after reading seven hundred and forty-nine ghost stories, Roald Dahl has selected these 15 stories that can not only make people feel the pleasure of fear, but also make readers appreciate the literary nature of high-level ghost stories.
Roald Dahl's selection of ghost stories has gone far beyond the flattening of the stall, and each one has its own exquisite and propositional. As Roald Dahl says in the preface, not only can female authors create classics in children's fiction, ghost stories are still very good subjects for female authors.
Rosemary Tipperley's Encounter at Christmas is a great example of how to associate children's fiction with ghost stories, and it can even be said to be a condensed version of Philippa Pierce's famous children's literature Tom's Midnight Garden. Also about the dislocation of time and the sharing of space, "Encounter at Christmas" is short and concise, two lonely people meet at Christmas, who is the ghost, it is impossible to say. However, this is not particularly important, what is important is that because of the overlap of space, two people who do not know each other have some "happy conversation". "Tom's Midnight Garden" is also like this, through time, the little boy Tom met Mrs. Bartholomew when he was a child, the two are each other's ghosts, but they can feel more real than anyone else in the world at this time. On the surface, it is the intersection of time and space, but in essence, it is sharing each other's spiritual space.
If metaphysical thinking about ghosts always points to time, then E. F. Benson's short story "Subway Tunnel" discusses this concept. In the novel, the author, borrowing Anthony, points out, "There is no such thing as 'time', it does not actually exist." Time is nothing more than an infinitesimal point in eternity... It's a tunnel that we're traveling through. "If we could stand in eternal time and observe our lives, ghosts are not terrible beings
The kind of ghost story that only pays attention to adrenaline always depicts the horror of the ghost's appearance in detail, only knows how to frighten the reader, but rarely brings the reader a sense of thrill. Good ghost stories always go beyond the level of covering the ears and eyes of the reader with fear, and they have intellectual intervention in addition to fear and strangeness.
In these stories compiled by Dahl, ghosts are not too vicious, and more often they coexist with humans. They can be more clearly represented in the eyes of some people, but they represent beings that transcend the rules of time, and they are either the brother of a girl, or an old man who is crazy to atone for his sins, or a group of girls who have died in disease. They still have a strong desire to peek into this fluid world. And those who have been writing for years may be impressed by the first novel called "W.S.", what is the essence of writing? Perhaps he had simply exiled a part of his soul to a distant place. And part of the exiled self will be some kind of supernatural being, with a strong desire to write, compelled to write.
Perhaps, the existence of ghosts represents that life does not have an end in time, and time does have no end, not starting with life, and naturally not ending with death. In the end, the living must lead to the path of death, like Richard Middleton's "The Fellow Traveler", where the wanderer sleeps all night in the snow that falls, wakes up glad he is not dead, but wakes up again and again after dying again and again. "All of us on this road, we are dead." Even though death is so repulsive and ghosts are so frightening, death can keep you young forever and float as a ghost forever.