Inside Jacket

Where’s Al Franken when you need him? Results are still coming in, but a picture of the incoming crop of freshmen senators and representatives has emerged. The class counts among its members lawyers, summer-camp directors, reality-show stars, heart surgeons, former N.F.L. offensive tackles, former F.B.I. agents, and businessmen, businessmen, businessmen, but virtually no published authors. The one exception is Vicky Hartzler, (R, Missouri), who published “Running God’s Way: Step by Step to a Successful Political Campaign” in 2007. No doubt Hartzler is singing hallelujah today. Will she write a follow-up now that she’s taken her own advice all the way to the House of Representatives (”Separating Church and State God’s Way,” perhaps)?

There is also a book not by but about another freshman, Allen West (R, Florida), called “A Missing Link in Leadership: The Trial of LTC Allen West.” It details West’s resignation from the Army, in which he had served nearly twenty years and reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, in 2004. He resigned following an investigation into accusations that he had mistreated a prisoner he was interrogating while serving in Iraq (he admitted wrongdoing and was fined five thousand dollars for misconduct and assault). The book is sympathetic to West, arguing that we need to embrace leadership theories that take into account the emotional complications of having to do things like interrogate terror suspects.

But who wants to think of such things while nursing an election-day hangover? Let’s focus instead on the lessons can we draw from this dearth of writers among our new congresspeople:

Lesson #1: Writers don’t want to go into politics for all the obvious reasons.

Lesson #2: Having a book to your name doesn’t count in local campaigns the way it can in national ones. True, Obama published “Dreams from My Father” in 1995, just as he was beginning to launch his political career, but I’d say the real payoff from that book came in 2008.

Lesson #3: To the victors go the spoils (or you have to be famous first). Everyone’s been talking about how yesterday’s winners are poised to have great careers because they’ll preside over the economic upswing when it comes. A great career in politics=a long career, and a long career=book deals. That is, these freshmen are unpublished—but many will be published in the future.

Lesson #4: That future may be far away (or the dirt stays under the rug until it’s all over). Hence, today we learn from a book that Cheney offered to resign in 2004, and that Bush considered taking him up on it, six years after the event.

For some a zombie apocolypse is the most terrifying way to imagine the world ending. A world full of human undead would be a living nightmare but a house full of zombie books is one of our wildest dreams.

Every year thousands of books go out-of-print and yet many of them deserve wider exposure. AbeBooks has chosen 25 books we would raise from the dead and reprint if we were a mad scientist. Our reasoning is that demand remains strong for this selection of literature as we see buyers scouring the world’s used and rare booksellers.

Read our list of books we would bring back from the dead

David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, has revealed that his favourite childhood book was Our Island Story by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall.

It’s a history book, first written in 1905, that details British life from the Romans to Queen Victoria’s death. Nick Clegg lets himself down by saying his favourite was The Gruffalo, reports the Daily Telegraph.

American financial and business magazine Forbes has published their 10th annual list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities – the celebrities whose estates and legacies keep the money rolling in with royalties long after their own demise.

Michael Jackson far and away tops this year’s list, but of the top 10, four are authors – J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles M. Schulz, Stieg Larsson and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) all placed.

Just in time for the ghastliest, ghouliest*, goriest of the holidays, the Guardian has posted bestselling author Kate Mosse’s list of her Top 10 favourite Ghost Stories.

Here they are:

1. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)
From the master of the morbid imagination, this gem of a story blurs the edges between horror and ghost fiction. A murderer’s guilty conscience gets the better of him, driving him to confess his crime. The unnamed narrator murders an old man with a “vulture eye”. He plans carefully and hides the body by dismembering it, but his guilt will not let him rest. Is he imagining the beating of the heart beneath the floorboards or is there something there? Gripping and horrifying, the perfect mix of horror and Gothic, the forerunner of the psychological ghost stories that were to come into vogue.

2. “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens (1866)
This perfectly balanced, beautifully judged story both preys on both the anxiety provoked by the new technology of railways and deeply held beliefs that a ghost can be an alarum for events to follow. Three times, the ringing of a spectral bell is followed by the appearance of a ghost, harbinger of a dreadful accident. Creepy, clever, and has you looking over your own shoulder.

3. “At Chrighton Abbey” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1871)
Another classic of ghost-story writing, with a doomed family and a crumbling, historic house at the heart of it. The narrator, Sarah, returns to her childhood home as a guest, having been obliged to work as a governess. There, although the halls are brightly lit and the old servants delighted to see her, a sense of disaster hangs over the festivities and Sarah’s glimpse of a ghostly hunt forewarns of tragedy to come.

4. “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” by MR James (1894)
This is the very first story in the first published MR James collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. A young Englishman and scholar leaves his friends for the day to spend time alone in a claustrophobic, decaying French cathedral city in the Pyrenees. He is encouraged by the sacristan to buy an antique manuscript volume which is possessed of older and evil memories. Wonderfully atmospheric, wonderfully creepy.

5. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James (1898)
This is, possibly, the most exquisite and perfect of all psychological ghost stories. Again, an unnamed narrator, another governess, a different manuscript that claims to tell the story of mysterious country house, a widower and his children and two ghosts of former servants of the house. It is never clear if the ghosts are real or the product of the governess’s increasingly unstable mind. And here, unlike in many ghost stories, there are several strong and engaging characters, not least of all the strange children, Miles and Flora. Simply, a masterpiece.

6. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood (1912)
Blackwood is the neglected master of the Edwardian ghost story renaissance. Gentlemen travellers and scholars fill his pages, but always with a psychological – often animist – slant on things. For Blackwood, Nature always has a capital ‘N’ and was a living, breathing thing, sometimes benign, but often sinister. This collection is the place to start, even though my favourite story is “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”, where a wife finds herself powerless to save her husband from the trees he loves. The forest does seem to be alive, getting closer and closer to the house, until the husband vanishes all together. Atmospheric, beautiful, a very subtle story of a peculiar haunting.

7. “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare (1912)
De la Mare was a significant writer of ghost stories, publishing some 40 supernatural tales in collections such as Eight Tales and On the Edge, but I’m choosing perhaps his most famous work, this lyrical and haunting poem. It’s never clear what bargain the traveller has made, and with whom, only that he has kept his word to come to the deserted house in the wood. The opening line still makes my hair stand on end: “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door.”

8. “Bewitched” by Edith Wharton (1925)
The celebrated author of novels such as The House of Mirth, Wharton was also a terrific writer of ghostly tales. A blend of Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James, she has a lightness of touch that belies the often very grisly tale. This story, first published in the Pictorial Review in 1925, has a fabulous sense of place and is a revenant story with a twist. It leaves the reader doubting their interpretation of events. Clever stuff.

9. “The Ghosts” by Antonia Barber (1969)
This is my favourite children’s ghost story, a wonderful time-slip novel set during the first world war. Lucy and Jamie Allen move with their mother and baby brother to the country, where their mother has been engaged by a mysterious gentleman, Mr Blunden, as caretaker of an abandoned house until the rightful owner can be traced. One day, Lucy is walking in the garden to explore and to pick flowers when she meets Sara and Georgie. It becomes clear that the children are ghosts, children of the house who died 100 years ago in the fire that destroyed the estate. It’s a gentle, thoughtful ghost story, of parallel time and the chance to make amends for mistakes in an earlier life. The novel won the Carnegie Medal and was filmed in 1972 as The Amazing Mr Blunden.

10. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1982)
For my money, the greatest of the contemporary ghost writers. Hill creates believable period characters, she creates a hermetic world that yet speaks of wider superstitions and histories, and creates plots with tension, pace and jeopardy without ever becoming heavy-handed. This is a story of vengeance, of an old curse from an embittered woman, all centred on the brooding Eel Marsh House, gloomy and isolated and cut off from the mainland at high tide. As the tension of premonition and disaster builds and builds, the ghostly screams of an accident long ago will haunt the reader’s imagination long after the last page has been turned. Perfect.

*not actually a word. Kids, don’t use it.