Trudging through this type of material can be rewarding when it leads the reader to review a beloved genre with deeper understanding. However, I have no idea what anyone would do with insights such as "UK hauntologists seem to have a nostalgia for the Brutalist architecture of postwar Britain." Author William Burns fails to adequately mine the rich themes of nostalgia in Twin Peaks: The Return, opting to mostly synopsize its wildly experimental eighth episode instead. A discussion of how The Twilight Zone regularly trotted out the notion that there's a serious downside to falling under the sway of nostalgia is more lucid but not necessarily more revelatory because it isn't exactly a fresh insight.
Fresh insights do pepper Ghost of an Idea, though. Burns's discussion of themes of sexism, imperialism, and classism in The Shining helped me to make sense of ideas in that film that generally struck me as mere coloring (such as the "Indian burial ground" trope) but may actually be essential. More profoundly, the pitfalls-of-nostalgia framework he hangs around the 2017 film A Ghost Story makes some sense of a haunting but initially confounding film. So that was a nice surprise.
I was also surprised to see how much more essential the notion of nostalgia is to Ghost of the Idea than any specific genre is. From its cover art and title, one might understandably assume that this book is solely focused on horror. Not at all. The film, literature, TV, and pop music Burns examines often have no connection to horror whatsoever. For example, he defines Pet Sounds, Village Green Preservation Society, and "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "Life in a Northern Town" as "pre-hauntological musical works." That I'm apparently a massive fan of pre-hauntological musical works is perhaps the book's biggest revelation of all. It's also something I'm never going to say out loud.
Despite not being able to control himself from, say, qualifying Re-Animator as "paradigm shifting," Burns does ease up on the borderline-parodic academic-speak as Ghost of an Idea moves beyond its opening chapter's "hauntology" theme. Occasionally, and welcomely, he even cracks wise. However, his series of rants against American Horror Story, recent Star Wars movies, and Toy Story 4 that ends the book firmly resides on the Island of Disgruntled Fanboys. It does undermine the ponderous seriousness that preceded this section, but not in a good way.
Ghost of an Idea is also structurally unexpected, with interviews (mostly with pop musicians I'v never heard of) and film and music reviews, and discographies (!) mixed in among its essays. Most bafflingly, there is a smattering of rock show reviews, leaving one with the idea that the book fell short of acceptable length and needed to be fattened up with whatever stray bits of writing Burns happened to have handy.
Despite its messiness and randomness, its passages of levity and agitation, Ghost of an Idea is still going to be most at home in the classroom. Horror fans who don't find it on this semester's curriculum might want to wade into it a little more cautiously than Heather, Mike, and Josh waded into the Burkittsville woods.
