The Big Book of Ghost Stories

July 30, 2012
The literary ghost comes in all shapes, sizes, and predispositions, and an impressive variety flits through Penzler’s latest mountain-sized omnibus (after Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!). There are urban ghosts in Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” and rural ghosts in Arthur J. Burks’s “The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee”; physical ghosts in Perceval Landon’s “Thurnley Abbey” and faux ghosts in Saki’s “The Open Window”; funny ghosts in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” and deadly serious ghosts in Ramsey Campbell’s “Just Behind You.” The most disturbing ghosts—among them the spurned lover in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom Rickshaw” and the neglected child in Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadowy Third”—are those whose persisting affections after death have curdled into an unholy hold on the living. The contents emphasize the classic over the contemporary, and though there are a few notable omissions (J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James), there’s enough in this volume to please both dilettantes and devotees among ghost story readers.

August 1, 2012
This is not an exhaustive collection, but it is certainly comprehensive. It's broken into 13 thematic sections and covers more than a century of stories. It's got everything from doomed love to seances to a little comic relief (Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde both appear). There are also some canonical classics, for the sake of completeness, including The Monkey's Paw, which remains a masterwork of atmospheric creepiness no matter how many times one reads it, one by Edith Wharton, and a pair by master storyteller Saki. The three contemporary stories presented at the end stand up quite nicely to the weight of the more classic works. Penzler has done an excellent job of collecting interesting, unnerving, and fascinating stories as well as providing nifty tidbits in the introductions. Reading most of these stories just before trying to sleep, though, is not recommended.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)