THE DEATH OF THE EVENING STAR: The Diary of a Young New England Whaler

Dark, brooding woodcuts, suspense built up throughout the diary's unevenly spaced entries, and the fears of the contemporary narrator (who tells how the diary was delivered into his hands by a ghost) all combine to create a mood of such penetrating eeriness that it's possible not to notice the essential vacuity of ""Jeremiah Poole's Own Account."" On the Evening Star's ill-fated voyage Jeremiah sees a kidnapped peddler thrown overboard, overhears the Captain plotting to murder the blackmailing Mr. Goodfellow, and, luckily, is safe in the Canary Islands when the ship goes down with all hands aboard. Presumably this traumatic chain of events caused Jeremiah's ghost to be still wandering the earth 130 years later, but though the young narrator is mightily impressed by this ""story of loneliness, labor, mayhem, murder, and merrymaking,"" it's not worth losing any sleep over.