Ghost Stories

by Everyman's Pocket Classics

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction, Classics

407 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a real mixed bag of stories. I was hoping for a lot more spookiness, a lot more horror, but the stories didn't really take me down that route all the time. There was sweetness and happiness and grief, but also proper horror and scares, so I guess ghost stories come in all shapes and forms. But there were just so many stories that didn't do it for me, and some of the best ones were ones I was already quite familiar with. Still, not a bad way to spend part of spooky season!

[Marieke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was... unexpected. Of course there was haunted furniture and possessed people but there was also grief and ... friendly ghosts? I think Katherine Mansfield's story was brilliant and I also loved 'The Horla' by Guy de Maupassant. Oh and Jorge Luis Borges! My god that was fascinating, didn't expect a story about dreaming in this collection either. It was not the typical ghost stories to tell around a campfire, but it is a great collection to read in autumn. Most stories had settings around this time, so there's many descriptions of autumn fields and harvest moons. There was mystery and haunted places and not much that bound the stories together, but I still had a great time reading it.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t judge this book by its dust jacket. Somehow the aggressive cat on the dust jacket lowered my expectations of this collection substantially; it just looked like a book where you’d read four-fifths of the stories in other anthologies.

Instead, this stout volume overruns with a well-chosen array of lesser-seen and really wonderful ghost stories. Although a few are familiar (Henry James’ “The Friends of Friends” and M.R. James’ “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” for example), most of the tales — stories by Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, and Alison Lurie, to name several — were new to me. Only two of the stories are what I consider over-anthologized: The Monkey’s Paw and The Open Window (both excellent classics that are chilling and delightful respectively).

Recommended! And, beneath The dust jacket is a very nice and suitably old-looking fabric hard cover. :)

[J. Wiltz · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can read my full review of "Ghost Stories" at: https://thosesentences.wordpress.com/...