The rage and sexual longings of lonely, well-bred women, for example, infuse the two great classics of the form: Henry James' "Turn of the Screw" and Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." Sarah Waters' masterly, enthralling new novel, "The Little Stranger," hews to the essential aspects of the traditional ghost story: the big spooky country house with a tragic past, the peculiar noises and eerie events that slowly intensify into a terrifying assault, the blurring line between internal turmoil and external phenomena, the skeptical scientific observer nudged ever closer to belief. Ghosts are not supposed to exist, which is one reason why ghost stories are often about things that people try to deny.
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