Told After Supper

Told After Supper

In all honesty, I was hoping for a creepy horror story when I first picked up Jerome K. Jerome's Told After Supper. Admittedly, I was not familiar with his work and thus, was not expecting a quirky little comedy about ghost tales. Once I started reading the book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was mostly his sense of humor and his way of adding a dark twist to our everyday customs. 

In true ghost story tradition, Jerome has opted for a storytelling session on Christmas Eve. Of course, soon enough, you realize that he doesn't do this because he is conforming to a social habit. Rather, he has a plan for poking fun at some of our habits which we take as norm. Plus, from his style of humor, you can also guess that he is a somewhat of a practical man. Thereby, from his take on different matters, it seems that he finds the fussy mannerisms of others to be somewhat over-the-top.

And so, this collection of stories starts out with a handy introduction. This is where you can a taste of things to come. You get a hint of his view on ghost stories in general but he takes it all in this stride. Thus, there is a hilarious little description of how ghosts are so exhausted by their venturings on Christmas Eve that no one hears a peep from them at any other time of the year. The best bit is his reference to the yearly hauntings: he proposes that these guys were “... indignant at having been buried in the dust-bin ... and who never gives the parish a single night's quiet until somebody has paid for a first-class funeral for him.”

This is followed by the stories themselves. Each one is quirky in its own way. The first one is called The Faithful Ghost and this has a group of people viewing the other worldly being with irritation rather than fear. What is even more surprising is the way these guys decide to deal with the haunting. An unusual (and sneaky) tactic but one that had me laughing and cringing at the same time.

Then came the story of The Ruined Home. I didn't find it as funny as the previous one. For me, the fact that the whole story consisted of the ghost encouraging the man to break down the house made it somewhat repetitive. To his credit, the author sums up the story with a charming little explanation about a disenchanted plumber.

Then there were The Ghost of Blue Chamber and the very last (unnamed) story. Both of the stories are actually linked: the first was a ghost story related by the narrator's uncle about a particular room in that setting and the second story is a result of the narrator venturing into that room. In this way, the first story sets the stage for what happens next because the reader has certain expectations about what would happen to the narrator if he slept in that haunted room. But what happened next was a series of events that was too funny to be scary. Oh, the man does meet a ghost but its version of its horrid deeds had an underlying tone of dark humor about it. Seems like the man went to great lengths just to avoid musicians and artists of all times which included persuading two annoying musically-inclined neighbors to run away together. This was, of course, part of his plan to rid his area of their blasted music.