The Norse settlers integrated well with indigenous tribes, and perhaps the long highland history of berserker warriors and their doomed courage comes from their pessimistic shadowy stories.
Researchers who discover the true owners of a painting stolen in wartime Europe and later acquired innocently or knowingly by a museum or gallery are piecing together shadowy stories of oppression, injustice, murder and destruction.
CHRIS CARTER is not the sort of guy you'd expect to produce shadowy stories about government conspiracies and alien invasions.
His friends and colleagues say he was chasing the story of a lifetime: the shadowy tale of Jonathan Keith Idema, a former Green Beret who claims to have fought in the Afghan war.
Taverner, whose shadowy life story has its own dramas, was by instinct a European, influenced by the music of Josquin des Prez and the Franco-Flemish school.
But often they go the opposite direction, creating shadowy interiors where stories lurk around every corner.
I checked out the same fifteen books over and over during my childhood and made the most out of terrifying myself with the collected stories of shadowy specters, dilapidated mansions, and the pale woman hitchhiker near the gates of some forgotten cemetery.
Mr. Barclay can't even match Mr. Coben's ability to ascribe minimally human motivations to the shadowy figures in his story.
The saint's life-story is shadowy, but he was apparently an army officer who fell foul of his emperor's campaign against Christians and was executed when he refused to relent.
There are some whose lives, and flaws, are recorded in every detail and others whose story remains shadowy, like the early Christian bishop in Anatolia whom we remember as Saint Nicholas (pictured)—or, as he is more commonly known, Santa Claus.
You may need a bit of time to adjust your eyes and expectations — the nighttime forest scenes, like those in Mr. Weerasethakul's "Tropical Malady," are shot in dim, shadowy light, and what story there is emerges slowly and in fragments — but after a while, like one of those ghosts, you will start to feel at home.
