For a few years now, around Christmas time, it has become a bit of a tradition for publisher Head of Zeus to release a thumping great anthology. Whether it has been Otto Penzler’s Zombies!, or his crime detective collections, the Vandermeer’s The Weird, and their SF & Fantasy Anthologies or the wonderful We, Robots edited by Simon Ings (and reviewed here), they’ve become one of my regular favourite (and heftiest!) reads of the year.
With that in mind, this was a bit of a late arrival this year but a very welcome one. It is a reprint, with the tome-like hardback first published in 2015, but this new edition, as part of the Anthologies collection, is a lovely quality, large paperback version.
The title says what is in the book. There are 100 stories arranged in chronological order, from Pliny the Younger’s The Haunted House, written sometime between AD 99 and 109, to James Robertson’s appropriately titled Ghost, first published in 2014.
With such a huge range to choose from, it is unlikely that every story will suit every reader. But there’s a whole roster of well-known names and unknown (to me) authors that make a generally engaging, if eclectic, mix.
For those who are regular readers of the genre there are the expected names – Sheridan le Fanu (Madam Crowl’s Ghost), Edgar Allan Poe (Tell-tale Heart), Bram Stoker (Dracula’s Guest), H.P. Lovecraft (The Terrible Old Man), H.G. Wells (The Inexperienced Ghost), M.R. James (Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad), Ray Bradbury (Mars is Heaven) and Stephen King (The Mangler), for example.
As expected, I enjoyed re-reading the classic favourites – I still regard M. R. James’ Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad one of the finest ever ghost stories of all time, Sheridan le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost still deserves its well-regarded status, Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest is still surprisingly effective considering its brevity and W.W. Jacob’s The Monkey’s Paw are all worth admission here. Ray Bradbury’s Mars is Heaven gives us science-fictional ghosts of a sort. H.G. Wells’s The Inexperienced Ghost is one of his lesser known stories, a fireside-told, shaggy dog story. At the other extreme, it may not surprise you that J.G. Ballard unsettles with The Dead Astronaut, a typically dark story about what happens to astronauts who die in space and then return to Earth.
I also enjoyed many of the stories written by well-known literary authors who are less known for their ghostly stories such as Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, Dylan Thomas, Frank Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Dylan Thomas, for example. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reminds us that there is more to her writing than just Frankenstein with Captain Walton’s Final Letter, as does Charlotte Bronte with Napoleon and the Spectre. Charles Dickens gives us Christmas Stories which combines Christmas tropes with ghostly happenings, whilst Sir Alec Guinness’s Money for Jam is a WW2-based oddity. Richmal Crompton’s The Ghost returns us to childhood with a story using the author’s famous Just William character.
For those who like their writing more modern, there’s quite a lot to choose from here as well – Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, William Faulkner, Kate Atkinson, Ruth Rendell, William Trevor, Helen Simpson, Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis and Annie Proulx are all here to show that ghosts literal, imaginative and speculative, all exist in the modern world too.
The only downside to this collection was perhaps the chronological order of the stories. I suspect some readers may find some of the older stories hard work, simply because they are not of this time. I quite like the sense of ancient history created by this and the chronological order does give the reader an idea of how the genre has evolved, but I for one struggled with the Scottish dialect in Sir Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale (a title that doesn’t work well for a modern audience!) for example. This may mean that less hardy readers of the supernatural may give up before they get to the modern form.
Nevertheless, this is a great collection that is worth buying for your next ghostly read, or perhaps for next Halloween. Like those volumes before it, Ghost is not a book to be consumed in long reads or binges but worked for me best when sampled and savoured, reading one or two stories a night, often at random – one of the reasons why it has taken so long to read! However, Head of Zeus have published another cracker.
I’m now wondering what they will do for next Christmas’s tome!
Ghost: 100 Stories to read with the Lights On Edited by Louise Welsh
Published by Head of Zeus, December 2021
Originally October 2015
816 pages
ISBN: 978-1800249677
Review by Mark Yon
