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Book Coach Corner: The Curse of the Catafalques
Background: What Is Book Coach Corner?
Book Coach Corner is a blog series that allows me (your neighborhood-friendly book coach) to analyze books, TV shows, and movies. I then dissect them in terms of story structure. As a heads up: there will be spoilers, and some posts may not make sense if you haven’t seen/read the work.
Those are the details. This entry explores my new fave short story, F. Anstey’s “The Curse of the Catafalques”. This entry will be short and sweet because I mostly wanted to write about how funny it is; but, the story also serves as a good example of how to write an unlikeable narrator.
Synopsis
This story follows a greedy, unnamed protagonist who takes the identity of another man to marry an eligible woman over Christmas. The protagonist soon regrets his decision, however, as, in order to wed the rich young woman, he has to meet the family’s ghost.
Quick Thoughts
I was laughing SO HARD reading this story. At first, I didn’t know it was supposed to be funny. It was written in the Victorian era, so the prose is elevated, and the tone doesn’t fully emerge until a few pages in.
