The Ghost House
I don’t usually relate to the paranormal, but a good book is a good book, and this is one of those ghost stories where the ghosts never actually appear and it is left to the reader to decide if they really existed outside the minds of the book’s tormented characters.
The setting is truly ghostly. The battle of Verdun in 1916 was the most terrible battle of the Western Front in WW1, in comparison with which the Somme was almost a sideshow. The battle was fought over quite a small area, leaving it a wilderness full of unexploded ordnance and the bodies of thousands of dead soldiers. After the war the area was sealed off and remains so today.
The Ghost House is set in 1944, in the last days of the German occupation of France in WW2, in a run-down chateau on the edge of the exclusion zone. A couple of Parisian occultists, sponsored by the Germans, rent part of the chateau as the base for a project to raise the spirits of the dead German soldiers of Verdun, to lend supernatural aid to repel the expected Allied invasion. The Nazis did indeed have a weird fascination with the occult, so the project is just about feasible. Obviously, it fails, disappointing the occultists and their sponsors.
The real focus of interest however is not the ghosts or the ghost-hunters but the household that inhabits the chateau. Vianne, a war widow, is carer for both her elderly mother-in-law and her orphaned nephew. Her daily struggle is scarcely lightened by her resentful cook, whom Vianne cannot afford to pay except in jewellery. The bickering between them and with the local villagers is expertly managed, mainly in dialogue. Read the book for this, even if you don’t like ghosts.
