Great American Ghost Stories: Lyons Press Classics

by Bill Bowers (editor)

A ghoulish collection of true American classics


With frightening stories from Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Harriett Beecher Stowe, O. Henry, Will Cather, and long forgotten yet terrifying authors, this ghostly collection of Lyons Press American Classics delivers the ghastly, horrifying, and otherwise haunting tales we love to read about—all from our deep history and in a book that makes a great gift as part of Lyons Press’s outstanding Americana library.

311 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2017

Reviews

[Ashley]

This book is fine? It has great selections (Twain, Wharton) and some WTF ones, with most being perfectly average.

[Jonathan]

Great American Ghost Stories (2017: Lyons Press); edited by Bill Bowers: One of roughly 1 million anthologies with this title, this 2017 offering is a better=than-usual out-of-copyright anthology, though the cumulative Scare-o-meter is set pretty low on this selection.

Editor Bill Bowers does do a good job of selecting several stories that I've never read before, along with solid stories from Poe, Wharton, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. The stand-out is Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman's 1903 classic "The Wind in the Rose-Bush." Recommended.

[Michael Simsa]

In what world are these ghost stories? Not a single person I know would consider the four stories I read before quitting a “ghost story”…

Some of the stories are quaint, but they were all written over a century ago and aren’t very compelling to a modern reader…especially after they realize they’ve been deceived regarding the contents of the book…

Bill Bowers and Lyon Press, I want my money back…

[Delaney Gifford]

“Ghost stories” is misleading. Some of the stories definitely have a paranormal theme, but some of the stories are just slightly unnerving. However, considering the time period that most of these stories were written it’s an OK book. Many of the stories have themes that aren’t terribly common in current writing. Nice change of pace.
A good book to read intermittently since each chapter is a new story.