Scary

For a brief moment last night, purely by accident, the following three books were stacked on the bed at my house:

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
Ghost Hunters, by Deborah Blum
The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connolly

The only one of the three having anything, really, to do with ghosts or spirits is Ghost Hunters, whose subtitle, "William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death" tells you all you need to know. Johnson's The Ghost Map, which was a pleasantly surprising Christmas gift from Stacey, is about London's 1854 cholera epidemic, while The Unquiet Grave, is a sort of commonplace book or journal that, if it's about anything, is about how Cyril Connolly can't form this mess of thoughts into a book.

But if I stack those in the window—maybe with The Oxford Book of Death on top and The Oxford Book of the Supernatural on the bottom—they would probably serve as a reasonably effective burglar-deterrent.

However, as Stacey pointed out last night when I broached the idea, we just might return from work one night to find our house lousy with ghosts and spirits of every stripe. They'd probably even have figured out how to work the buzzer and let all the vampires in, too.