A gifted writer who used many different styles and techniques, Dunsany had a writing career that spanned more than half of the revolutionary twentieth century, during which time literary fashions underwent many changes. His early short stories, of which “The Ghosts” is a good example, are written in an ornate, poetic style reminiscent of the florid writing and romantic literary conventions of Edgar Allan Poe, with considerable emphasis on description of landscapes, costumes, and interior furnishings. Readers had more patience with lengthy passages of such description before modern photography made pictures commonplace. Dunsany’s later stories, such as “The Two Bottles of Relish” (1932), published after Europe had been through the devastating World War I and was entering the Great Depression, are far more realistic, more democratic, less descriptive, and even “minimalistic” by comparison.

Dunsany’s collected works show great technical virtuosity. His short story “The Two Bottles of Relish,” for example, uses the persona of a faux naïf Cockney narrator who is obviously poorly educated and has little experience in putting his thoughts into words. “The Ghosts” presents a striking contrast. The narrator is obviously intelligent, sensitive, and well educated. He has a good knowledge of history and an excellent vocabulary. The reader is reminded of the highly articulate and sometimes poetic fictitious narrators of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). In fact, Dunsany seems heavily indebted to Poe for many of his inspirations.

“The Ghosts” begins like an old-fashioned ghost story of the type that have elicited fear and trembling since time immemorial. Tellers of such stories enjoy terrifying people by employing a somber tone and presenting lurid descriptions of decay—gloomy old mansions with rats in the walls, eerie noises, cloudy winter skies shattered by bolts of lightning—and their audiences enjoy being terrified. Dunsany begins his story very much in the manner of a conventional ghost story in order to lull the reader into a false sense of security. He even gives his story the title “The Ghosts” in order to make it appear that he is planning to narrate a stereotypical ghost story. The reader expects the skeptical protagonist to see a ghost or two, become badly frightened, and believe in ghosts forever after. As novelist Vladimir Nabokov once noted, “The ’I’ in the story cannot die in the story.” The fact that the protagonist is telling of his own experience offers the reader assurance that he did not die of fright or go into a catatonic state of psychosis.

The reader is intentionally lulled into a false sense of security; then Dunsany injects a note of true horror by introducing a pack of hideous animal-ghosts. This is not part of the conventional ghost story. It is more than the reader bargained for, but the reader by now is too involved to be able to shut the book. Like the narrator, the reader expects to see only one or two transparent figures dressed in sheets and perhaps to hear a few moans or some rattling chains; now, like the narrator, the reader finds him-or herself trapped in a hellish, life-threatening, perhaps even soul-threatening situation.

Now that Dunsany has managed to capture the reader in the web of his narrative, he goes further, step by step, by using these affectionate monsters from hell to suggest that all human beings have secret impulses that they cannot escape in life or in death. When the narrator acknowledges that he himself is capable of murdering his own innocent brother and concocting an elaborate lie to escape punishment, it is but one step further to accuse the reader of being capable of such unspeakable thoughts.