Responding to our recent post about ghost stories, blogger Levi Stahl wrote to suggest that we highlight Edmund Wilson’s “A Treatise on Tales of Horror,” a Books piece from the issue of May 27, 1944. In the article, Wilson relates his surprise at the enduring popularity of the genre:

One had supposed that the ghost story itself was already an obsolete form; that it had been killed by the electric light. It was only during the ages of candlelight that the race of ghosts really flourished, though they survived though the era of gas.

Wilson offers two reasons for the ongoing interest in tales of the supernatural:

First, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion, when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel that our own world has failed us, we try to find evidence for another world; second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic before the real terrors loose in the world—the Gestapo, the G.P.U., tank attacks, bombing from the air, and empty cities mined with booby traps—by injections of imaginary horror which soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to provide us with mere dramatic entertainment.

It would seem that horror stories are just as popular now as they were in Wilson’s time, and, perhaps, for reasons not all that dissimilar. Vampires are all the rage in pop culture, and the Library of America has just released “American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now” edited by Peter Straub.

For those of you less compelled by discussions of horror and the supernatural, why not take a look at some of the other offerings in the issue? (The current Candy Bowl issue is always password-free, and open to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.) Your options include a Letter from London by Mollie Panter-Downes, fiction by Sally Benson, poetry by Phyllis McGinley, a Small Fry cartoon by William Steig, and a Reporter at Large by Robert M. Coates about the bars of Times Square.

To suggest a piece for the Candy Bowl, write to us with a brief explanation of why you’re recommending it.