Andrew Clavin dismantles George Sachs’ satirical "How to Be a Racist" as a self-contradictory hit piece, exposing how modern microaggression policies—like UCLA’s identity-studies mandate—replace Shakespeare with critical theory, stifling free speech. He contrasts 1970s Berkeley’s racial airtime blocks (resolved without bureaucracy) with today’s "victimhood power dynamics," citing Heather McDonald’s critique of bias-free language training as counterproductive. Clavin defends European art’s universal legacy—rooted in Judeo-Christian and classical traditions—not race—and warns identity politics erode Western culture, recommending The Little Stranger as a ghostly metaphor for its decline. [Automatically generated summary]
That's the name of a real-life article published in the Huffington Post by clinical psychologist George Sachs.
Sachs writes, quote, somewhere, down where we don't like to go, is a place where racism lives.
This, by the way, is also true of Jockich.
Let's take a look at the 10 white liberal microbehaviors Sachs says keep racism alive.
And these are all really from the article, I promise.
Number one, denial.
According to Sachs, this is when white liberals deny that they ever have racist thoughts.
When a white liberal says something like, quote, I don't even see color, that's denial.
Unless, of course, he's carrying a silver cane and wearing dark glasses, in which case he may actually be blind.
Number two, shame and hurt.
This is when a white liberal says he's embarrassed by his own racist remarks.
Sachs says this only serves to focus the attention on the white person, taking the attention away from the oppressed person of color.
Instead, focus your attention on the person of color by saying something like, come any closer and I'll call the police.
Number three, narcolepsy and ignorance.
This is when a white liberal simply says nothing on the subject of race at all.
I mean, really.
Say nothing about racism.
You disgust me, white liberals.
Number four, masochism.
Sachs says this is when a white liberal's guilt runs amok.
Here's a quote directly from the article, quote, taking the neighborhood's homeless black man in for a meal may help him, but does the giving come from a place of joy or guilt?
So play it safe and let the beggar starve.
Number five, apology and faux compassion.
When you apologize too quickly, Sachs says, you may miss your chance to acknowledge your participation in racism.
And you wouldn't want to miss that.
Instead, Sachs advises you to just say, I'm here to listen and learn, then quietly sneak away.
Number six, defensiveness.
That's when a white liberal says, I'm not racist.
I mean, if you just come out and say, I'm racist, then we know you're racist.
But when you say, I'm not racist, then we know you're racist.
Number seven, the pain game.
That's when you try to top a colored person's suffering with your own by saying something like, and again, I'm quoting from the article, you're not the only ones.
My family was wiped out in the Holocaust.
Obviously, your family getting wiped out in the Holocaust can't be worse than talking to a white liberal.
Number eight, racial resume.
This is when you submit evidence of your tolerance, as in saying, I voted for Obama.
Dead giveaway of racism, since anyone who voted for an incompetent blowhard like Obama obviously just did it because he's black.
Number nine, white guilt.
This, says Sachs, is when you perpetuate racism by feeling bad about it.
So don't do that.
Simply sneer at black people and say, who cares about racism?
I'm white, and things are going great for me.
Black people love that.
And finally, number 10, intellectualization.
But since we're talking about white liberals, there's little chance of that.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
I was going to write a joke in that opening.
I was going to write a joke that George Sachs, the author of the piece, was either a clinical psychologist or he was wearing the clothes of a clinical psychologist whose body would be found in the air vent of the lunatic asylum from which George Sachs escaped.
But I was afraid.
I was afraid if I put that in there without actively saying it was a joke that we'd get sued.
But I'm sorry, by my mind, that is insanity.
To my mind, that's insanity.
If you say something, you're racist.
If you don't say something, you're racist.
If you say I'm racist, you're racist.
If you say I'm not racist, you're racist.
It's absolute madness.
And the kind of sad thing is that there are kids.
This is what they're teaching kids in college.
And there are kids who are going to buy into it.
When I was in college, and admittedly a long time ago, but I went to the University of California at Berkeley, so it was on the cutting edge of this stuff.
I mean, this poison was seeping into the culture, even then.
And I volunteered to be on the campus radio station, which I think was called Calex or something.
And of course, everybody else who wanted to be on the campus radio station wanted to be a DJ.
They wanted to play music.
But since I never liked contemporary music, I wanted to do the news.
So I became the news department.
I think I may have had one or two people working with me, but I think I was in, as I recall, I was in charge of the news department.
I was the news director.
But what I didn't notice, and one of the reasons I've lived such a happy life is I have a very high capacity for not noticing stupidity when it's all around me.
I can't tell you the number of times in the course of my marriage my wife has said to me, did you hear what that woman said?
And I've said, no, no.
And so I didn't really even notice that the blocks of time on the radio station were divided racially.
There was a black block and there was an Asian block and there was each race had his own block of time.
And so I would just go in every day and do what I think was the 6 o'clock newscast and I'd compile the newscast off the wires and from the newspapers.
And one day I'm sitting in there putting together my newscast when I look up and there is an enormous Native American guy standing over me, looking down at me.
And he says, why is a white man doing the news in the Native American block?
Now what this guy didn't realize was I was a big John Wayne fan and being attacked by a gigantic Indian was actually a life goal for me.
This was on my bucket list.
I was momentarily contemplating shooting out his eyes so he couldn't find his way to the happy hunting ground.
On consideration, on consideration, I said in a relatively polite voice, that's nonsense.
The news is the news.
I'm here to read the news.
If you have a problem with it, go complain to somebody.
Leave me alone.
He cracked up.
He laughed.
Nobody had ever said anything like that to him, and we became fairly decent friends.
He would go on every day on his newscast.
When he'd introduce me, he would play some novelty song called You Talk Too Much, because he was kidding me about what a big mouth I had for telling him that I was going to do the news.
And so we became friends, and it worked out fine.
That would never, ever happen today.
It would never happen today because too much power is involved in victimhood.
And who gets that power?
Who gets the power when you are a victim?
It's supposed to be the victim gets the power by saying, I'm more of a victim than you, I get the power.
But really, the power goes to the powerful.
The power goes to the people who are going to resolve the conflict for you.
Power Shifts in Victimhood00:15:30
The government, the academic institution, and this enormous expansion of useless, useless, useless, did I already say useless?
Useless, like middle managers who have taken over our universities and have names like the bias director and stuff like this, that have taken over our universities and are sucking your tuition money.
The reason, one of the reasons that education is so expensive is because of this incredible proliferation of these, have I called them useless, useless people who basically resolve these differences for you and they're not going to give up your power.
And that's why, I mean, look at this.
This is something I found in City Journal in an article by Heather McDonald.
Heather McDonald is one of the best reporters in the country.
Also, she's what the British call a thinking man's crumpet.
I'm crazy about Heather.
And I've been at these parties whenever intellectual, she's very attractive, especially when you meet her in person.
She has a lot of charisma and personality.
And I've been at these parties, and whenever intellectual men meet her, they walk away with this little sparkle in their eye.
You can almost see like this little star.
She's nice.
I like Heather.
She's a thinky man's crumb, but she's also seriously one of the best and toughest and smartest reporters in the country.
All you have to know about the Pulitzer Prizes is that Heather will never win one.
That tells you everything you need to know.
So she's been covering these microaggression things, and she linked to what is the UC, the University of California, UCLA, I think, but I think it's for the whole UC system.
Their guidance for faculty on how to recognize microaggression.
And it gives you examples of something you might say that is microaggressive, like, where are you from?
And that means, and then it tells you, that's the example, and then the message is, you are not a true American, okay?
And you are so interesting looking.
That's the example, and the message is, you are a perpetual foreigner in your own country, okay?
And this is, and this is not just, it's not just the UC system.
I mean, the University of New Hampshire has now published a list of bias-free language that tells you what language is problematical, including words like mothering, fathering, healthy, homosexual, rich, poor, senior citizen, and American.
These are problematical words because everything, everything is a microaggression.
Let me just ask you this as just a matter of basic wisdom, okay?
Let's say you were talking to your own child.
Let's say you were just trying to give your child a happy life, a happier, productive life.
Which of these pieces of advice would be more conducive to a happy, productive life?
Saying, you know, let a minor slight pass, assume people meant well, and go about your business.
If you have a problem with somebody, talk it out.
Or, look for every microaggression.
I mean, it's a microaggression.
By definition, by definition, it's micro.
You can't see it.
You can't see it.
So you have to be actively looking for it to find these microaggressions.
And these guys are teaching our children how to have miserable, miserable lives.
And if you think this is taking the humor out of college life, that is literally true.
I mean, now comedians no longer want to go and perform at college campuses, which used to be their great venue.
I mean, this is where a comedian went because comedians were hip and they were cool and they're pushing the envelope and college students were supposed to love that.
No more.
Forget about it.
I mean, even Chris Rock, he said he's not going to perform on college campuses anymore because they're too conservative.
Because Chris Rock thinks it's conservative when you shut people down, when you tell people you're offended.
Not long ago, Jerry Seinfeld had made a comment on, I think it was, I wrote it down, it's that late night with Seth Myers.
So he was talking about political correctness.
And here's what he had to say about it.
But they keep moving the lines in for no reason.
Right.
I do this joke about the way people need to justify their cell phone.
I need to have it with me because people are so important.
You know, I said, well, they don't seem very important the way you scroll through them like a gay French king.
You know, just well.
That's very offensive to the gay French king.
I did this line recently in front of an audience.
And comedies where you can kind of feel like an opinion.
And they thought, what do you mean, gay?
What are you talking about?
Gay?
What are you saying, gay?
What are you doing?
What do you mean?
And I thought, are you kidding me?
I mean, we can't even.
I could imagine a time, and this is a serious thing.
I can imagine a time when people say, well, that's offensive to suggest that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing motion and you now need to apologize.
I mean, there's a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me.
Now, Seinfeld, you know, I don't know.
I hate to use the word genius about it.
The Seinfeld Show was one of, was really a cultural landmark.
I mean, it really defined the Clinton era.
I can imagine, I think it's possible.
The last time there was an era of irony and kind of emptiness and anti-masculinity and things was kind of defined by the poetry of Alexander Pope, who wrote a story, wrote a poem called The Rape of the Lock, which I can't quote from memory, but it opens with a line talking about what tremendous meaning there is in little things, right?
And that was the Seinfeld Show.
And it's not impossible to imagine that in the same way people go back to Alexander Pope to find out about that time, they'll go back to the Seinfeld show and look at that.
So this is a guy who really knows what he's talking about.
Compared to Sarah Silverman, who I think is, first of all, I think she's just not a very bright person.
But I also think as a comedian, she has one trick.
She has this cute little innocent face and she curses.
And that, I found that really funny twice.
You know, I thought that was really, you know, I laughed out loud the first time she did it.
I was kind of stunned.
And I think it was, I think it was Seinfeld.
I may be wrong about this, but it was some comedian who said, when you curse and people laugh, you might be funny.
But when you don't curse and people laugh, you know you're funny.
I mean, in other words, when people curse, you laugh.
I mean, I see Louis C.K. does this all the time.
And it's funny because I think his clean material is so much funnier than his blue material.
But, you know, he at least does it with some kind of style.
Sarah Silverman is not very bright.
She fought back.
And this is something that is happening.
All the people who are complaining about this kind of microaggressive sensitivity, there are also people fighting back.
One of them is Sarah Silverman.
Now, she made this comment.
She was out promoting her new movie.
I don't even know what it was called.
It kind of came and went already.
But she was promoting her new movie, and she was asked about this.
And here was her response.
To a degree, everyone's going to be offended by something, so you can't just decide on your material based on not offending anyone.
But I do think it's important as a comedian, as a human, to change with the times, to change with new information.
I don't think there's anything wrong with changing with the times.
I think it's a sign of being old when you are put off by that.
I caught myself a few years ago fighting gay.
I say gay, like that's so gay.
I just say gay.
I have gay friends.
I don't mean it like gay.
I mean it like it's gay, like it's lame.
And then I stopped myself and said, what am I fighting?
I have become the guy from 50 years ago who said, I say colored, I have colored friends.
It's not hard to change with the times.
And I think it's important.
And when you have new information and you become more aware of the world around you, you can change.
I don't say that things are gay anymore if I think they're lame.
I don't even think about it.
It didn't take long to get used to it.
And to that effect, I think you have to listen to the college aged because they lead the revolution.
They're pretty much always on the right side of history.
I could talk for about an hour about that, right?
I mean, first of all, why is it better to call something lame than gay?
Aren't you insulting lame people?
I mean, aren't you insulting like cripples?
I don't call it gay anymore.
I call it crippled, you know?
I got all retarded.
I don't call it gay.
And secondly, by the way, if gay people have lost their sense of humor, why do we need gay people?
I mean, I thought it was the whole purpose, the whole purpose of them, they were so witty and funny.
I always liked that about them.
But underneath all this is this, obviously, this desperate, desperate need on the part of the second-rate comedian to stay relevant, to think of herself as hip and cutting edge, which obviously Seinfeld, being now an accomplished man and a sort of dean of comedians, doesn't need anymore.
All I could think of when I was listening to her is there's a line in King Lear where King Lear stands, you know, says, says, oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven, you know.
I was listening to her, oh, let me not be old, not old, sweetheart.
You know, it's a sign, if you don't go with the times, if you don't change with the times, you're old.
It's a sign of being old, she says.
And then that incredible remark she makes about college students, that they are leading the revolution and they are always on the right side of history.
Obviously, she doesn't know anything about history, or she would know that's not true.
But think about this for a minute.
I mean, the one thing we can say about young people, listen, young people know things that I will never know.
Like, move their thumbs like this really, really fast.
I'm never going to be able to do this.
But otherwise, otherwise, by definition, by definition, young people are ignorant.
That is what youth is.
It's being ignorant.
And sometimes in that ignorance, they don't know they can't do things, you know, and they do things that are fantastic that older, wiser heads would never try.
There's no fool like an old fool, certainly.
You know, if you've been lived a long time and you haven't learned anything, you really must be an idiot.
But you have to say that while they know things that I will never know, I know things that they have yet to learn.
Okay, and one of the things that I know that they have yet to learn is that this microaggression thing is not an isolated idea.
The idea that you have to be offended by every reference to your race, every reference, you know, there's this thing, there's this actual microaggression project.
Let me see if I can have, here it is, the microaggression project, where you go to complain about your microaggressions, right?
And there's a little list and it tells you what somebody said, and it's like, you know, is she yours?
Oh, a stranger said this to me, a white woman, because I have a black daughter.
Oh, I such an aggression.
Don't you think your reaction was offensive to others as well?
This is a white teacher talking to a black student.
Just list the ways you've been offended, okay?
This is the tale of a very large dog, okay?
And it's a dog that is actually eating away at these kids' chance to become something other than ignorant.
Their chance at an education, their chance to become part of a great culture that is waiting for them to take their place in it.
But this microaggression dog is really part of this racial idea, this gender idea, this identity idea.
Let's call it the madness of identity, the superstition of identity, that is really eating away at their educational system.
Here is a video that Heather McDonald just made this week, I think.
It comes out from Prague University, the wonderful Prager University, which we all love because it's produced by the very people in this room.
They make, I don't think they actually did the post-production on this one, but they usually do.
Prager University is one of the most popular conservative video series on the web.
Here's Heather talking about what's happening in universities in a broader way.
Here's a tragedy in its way on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.
To get a bachelor's degree in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the most prestigious colleges in America, you must take courses in gender, race, ethnicity, disability, or sexuality studies, in imperial, transnational, or post-colonial studies, and in critical theory.
But you are not required to take a single course in Shakespeare.
In other words, The UCLA English faculty is now officially indifferent as to whether an English major has ever read a word of the greatest writer of the English language, but is determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.
So in other words, the idea of racism and identity, this craziness, the madness of identity, is not just something that is being taught given to these kids as a tool of fighting back against the evils of microaggression.
It's actually replacing the study of Western culture and civilization.
This thing, critical theory, what critical theory is, is it's reading a book, a Shakespeare play, and critiquing it from a point of view.
So taking, if you're a feminist, you can have feminist critical theory, and you look at the way Shakespeare marginalized women or was bigoted against women.
You know, the great proliferator of this was Edward Said.
And if you ever want to read my novel, Empire of Lies, you can find an Edward Said character who gets kneecapped with a ball peen hammer, which was a fantasy of mine.
Edward Saeed would write these books and say, oh, Jane Austen, if you're reading Jane Austen, you're really reading this imperialist.
She's really selling imperialism.
And he would pretend to love Western culture, but he was always taking it apart and saying that it was promulgating this racism, promulgating imperialism and all this.
Now think about this for just a minute about critical theory.
That what that's saying is that, I mean, literature is like a time machine.
It's right.
Somebody, this brilliant man, Shakespeare, a mind greater than any that has ever existed before or since, comes through time in the form of this play and tells you what things were like, where he was, what he saw, what he thought, and you impose on it through critical theory.
You impose what you already know, what you already think, the opinions you already have about racism and sexism, you shut him down.
It's like, don't talk to me, Shakespeare, from your perspective of 400 years ago.
You know, I know better.
We have now progressed to the point where I don't even have to listen to you.
I just have to listen to myself talking about you.
So why?
Why are they doing this?
Why is the university gutting, this is something that happened in the 60s, and the kids in the 60s were marching around singing, hey, hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.
Why Western Civ Must Go00:04:03
They have now accomplished this.
Why?
What were they doing?
My personal opinion, all right?
The culture of modern Europe, which is the culture from the Renaissance, I would say to World War I, but let's push it and say to World War II, let's say World War I and World War II were really one big war that destroyed Europe.
I mean, Europe is now a dead body basically being devoured by the people who are the Muslims coming in and all these foreigners who are taking it over and all these bad ideas.
The culture of Europe, from the Renaissance to the ends of the wars, created the greatest works of art that have ever been created by man on earth, ever, anywhere.
Greece, ancient Greece, Pericles in Greece, close second, but the cultures of Europe were so diverse, so brilliant, so incredible.
People want to say, this doesn't mean, by the way, that they were good people.
This doesn't mean that they were nice guys or doing good things at all, at all.
In fact, we have to look.
I always want to play this, and I never have time.
This is from Graham Greene's The Third Man, which is possibly, it's at least one of my three favorite movies.
This is Orson Welles talking about the effect of culture versus what's going on in history.
What the fellow says.
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borges, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love.
And they had 500 years of democracy and peace.
And what did that produce?
The cuckoo clock.
So the bloodshed and the borges and the poisoning of Italy gives you the Renaissance.
And in democracy and peace in Switzerland, you get the cuckoo clock.
So it's not a question of being good people.
It's not a question of being nice people.
It's a question of something else.
To say that all cultures produce great art, to say that all cultures are, the art of all cultures is as good as any other art, is like saying that all roads lead to God, which is essentially saying there is no God.
To say that all culture, all art is equally great is saying there is no art.
There is nothing.
It's just the quality of whether you like it or not.
Oh, I like Shakespeare, but I don't like Dostoevsky.
So that matters whether they're great or not.
That is to say that art does nothing.
But art does do something.
Art has a purpose, just like everything that people do.
The purpose of art is to record and preserve and express the inner life of what it's like to be a human being.
Okay, this is what I've spent my life doing.
I know what I'm talking about.
The idea is to record the inner experience of being a human being.
This is true of every single person on earth.
There are no words for this experience.
If you ask an athlete, okay, I pick athletes because athletes express things usually through their amazing physical feats, not through their words.
They're not the most articulate of people usually.
If you go to an athlete and you say, what was it like to pitch a no-hitter?
What was it like to throw that touchdown pass to win the Super Bowl?
What was it like?
He's going to do one of three things, and they're the same three things that every one of us is going to do when we're asked what something is like to us inside.
He is either going to say words can't express it, okay, because words can express it, or he's going to tell you about the physical sensations.
Oh, my heart sped up, I was breathless, it was just amazing.
Or he's going to create a rudimentary work of art.
He's going to create a metaphor.
He's going to say it was like waking up on Christmas morning and seeing the presence under the tree.
It was like, you know, suddenly finding yourself in utopia.
It was like, you know, being told you have to avenge your father's death and not being able to make up your mind.
You know, it was like all the things that art does, the music that we play that expresses these things that are inexpressible, the stories we tell that express these things.
Why tell a story?
Why did Jesus tell stories?
Why tell a story if it just boils down to a message, if it can be reduced to a message?
Ask any artist what his book is about.
And any novelist what his book is about, and he will tell you, it's the book.
You have to read the book.
That's what the book is about.
It's the experience of reading the book, a painting.
Why Stories Matter00:03:45
All these things express the inner life of man that has never been done better or so often as it was done in modern Europe.
Mozart, Bach, Shakespeare, Keats, Michelangelo, Rubens Van Gogh, these people simply do not exist in any other culture, which is not to say other cultures haven't done great things.
It is simply to say this is better.
This was done better in Europe than it was ever done anywhere else.
Why?
Why did that happen?
Well, it can't, a lot of people say, oh, well, it's the race.
It's the European races.
But think about this for a minute.
Just think about it historically.
First of all, the people who made Europe were the trash of the Roman Empire.
They were the barbarians.
These were the people, you know, talk about illegal immigration.
The Romans wanted to keep these German tribes out of Rome, but they had expanded so far that their troops couldn't protect the borders anymore.
And the German tribes just moved in.
There were laws against it, and they just came on in, and they eventually brought the civilization down.
They were called the barbarians because the Greeks had this beautiful language that expressed thoughts and philosophy and ideas.
And everybody else, when they were talking, just sounded to them like they were saying, ba, ba, ba, ba.
So they called them barbarians.
Really, it was like, it was like calling someone the stut, stut, stutterer.
These were the barbarians.
These were the trash of the Roman Empire.
And they came in and they brought Rome, ultimately brought Rome down in trying to become part of it.
They brought Rome down.
And Rome was dying of its own volition.
And then there was a thousand years of darkness from the fall of the Roman Empire to the great era of the Renaissance.
Really, it was a thousand years, and obviously it wasn't utter darkness, and people have rediscovered the Middle Ages and all this stuff.
But it really was a downtime in the history of Western culture.
A thousand years is a long time for a single life, but it's nothing in evolutionary terms.
There's no possible chance that these races went from being the barbarian races to evolving into something different.
You know, there are people who say that biology is fate.
I mean, Freud said that in another context, but there are people who think demography is fate.
That's what Mark Stein is always arguing.
I don't think any of these things.
There is no fate.
There are only choices between ideas, between good ideas and bad ideas.
And the ideas that made the West, which were the ideas of Jerusalem and Athens, they were the ideas of the classic world, the Greeks and the Romans, and the Jewish Bible promulgated through the New Testament, sent forth through the New Testament.
These were the ideas that made, that shaped these barbaric cultures into a culture that was still kind of barbaric.
I mean, they were fighting each other right until they blew themselves to bits in World War II, but that created these works of art that express the inner world better than any before or since.
And those are the ideas.
See, it seems like if you think in terms of race, the minute you think in terms of race, you go insane.
The minute you think in terms of race, everything you think after that is stupid.
So if you think that, oh, these guys, these were white men, therefore they were excluding black men, therefore they're excluding women, that has nothing to do with it.
It was about the ideas.
It was about the culture that created this thing.
And this is your culture, whether you're black or Asian or Latin or whatever you are, male or female, this is your culture, and it's being taken away from you in the name of race to give these people the best reading I can.
The left thinks this is the cure for racism, but it's the disease.
It's the racism itself that they're just continuing.
And they're using it to eat away the culture that would give these kids the wisdom to continue Western culture into the next generation.
That's going to be taken away from them.
That's what I have to say.
That is everything I have to say today.
Ghost Stories and Culture00:02:39
And now I just want to stop and do stuff I like.
Because if we're going to talk about culture, let's talk about culture.
Stuff I like.
This is Halloween stuff I like.
We're on the last one.
When is Halloween?
Is it Saturday?
All right, Saturday.
So this is Tuesday, so we have two more stuffs I like before.
And everything I've done up till now has been kind of classic stuff.
Not everything, but a lot of it's been old.
M. R. James, and yesterday I did Diabolique, which is 1950s.
So I wanted to find something that was modern.
And I've been talking a lot.
First, just to remind you that what I like is not horror.
It's these ghost stories.
They're subtle.
They're not, you know, terrifying.
They're not blood-drenched.
But they kind of send a chill up your spine, a very subtle chill up your spine.
And most of ghost stories that are written down, as I've said, are short stories because the ghost, it's the way the ghost story works.
The ghost story works through repetition.
Something happens, something happens again, then something happens even bigger than that, and it's explained in this ghostly, creepy way.
And that's almost the structure of every ghost story.
And that doesn't really, it's not a good structure for a novel.
It's a good structure for a short story or a movie.
But every now and again, somebody writes a really good novel.
We talked about The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
Not that long ago, 2009, a woman named Sarah Waters wrote a book called The Little Stranger.
And by the way, women have written a huge number of the great ghost stories.
I mean, just have been huge contributors to the ghost story.
Sarah Waters wrote a book called The Little Stranger in 2009.
Now, I want to emphasize again, this is a subtle book.
It's not going to, you know, make your hair stand on end.
But people who like Downton Abbey by my old pal Julian Fellows, who like Downton Abbey are going to love this book.
It takes place in the same part.
Stephen King in 2009 put it at the top of his best books list.
He wrote, this is a terrifying, engrossing ghost story set in the English countryside, not long after World War II, but it's so much more.
The ghosts haunting Hundreds Hall may or may not be real, but the malevolence Waters evokes is unquestionable.
Although told in straightforward prose, this is a deeply textured and thoughtful piece of work.
Several sleepless nights are guaranteed.
I won't guarantee you sleepless nights.
I didn't think it was terrifying, but I thought it was really creepy.
The end of it is really creepy.
I mean, just the reveal of what's going on.
Very deep, very intelligent, and has a lot to say about some of the stuff we're talking about, about cultures, when they die, and when they fade away, and who takes them over.
It's a really good book.
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger, excellent ghost story for Halloween.