Strange Things That Really Do Happen — To Be Read at Dusk
Five couriers sit together at the top of a mountain pass as the light fails, trading stories to pass the evening. One of them, German, is insistent on a point: he doesn't believe in ghosts. He's quite firm about it. There are no ghosts, he says, only strange things that really do happen.
Then he tells two stories that make that distinction very hard to hold onto.
It's a clever piece of framing on Dickens's part, and it gives the whole collection its title for a reason. This is a writer who spent his whole life insisting he didn't believe in the supernatural while being unable to stop writing about it, and here he's built a narrator who makes exactly that same claim, in exactly the same breath as the story that undermines it.
Something to think about:
the courier tells us he doesn't believe in ghosts, only in strange things that really do happen.
Is that a meaningful distinction, or just a more comfortable way of saying the same thing?
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