The Wrong Turning: Encounters with Ghosts

by Stephen Johnson (Editor)

Why do people love ghost stories, even if they don’t believe (or say they don’t believe) in ghosts? Is it simply the adrenaline rush that comes from being mesmerized and terrified by a great storyteller, or do these tales yield deeper meanings—telling us things about our own inner shadows? Stephen Johnson brings together some of the most memorable encounters with ghosts in world literature, from Europe, Russia, the United States, and China. Recurring themes and imagery are noted, interpretations suggested—but only suggested, since ambiguity and resistance to rational interpretation are key elements in the best ghost stories. As the writer Robert Aickman observed, often the decisive moment comes when someone, somehow, makes a “wrong turning”—literally, perhaps, but at the same time psychologically, even morally—and some mysterious nemesis takes over.

Old favorites by M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are interlaced with extracts from longer works by Emily Brontë, Henry James, Alexander Pushkin, along with slightly left-field apparitions from Tove Jansson, and Flann O’Brien. With such expert guides, who knows what we will be led to encounter in the haunted chambers of our minds?

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories

192 pages, Hardcover

Published October 19, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Marilyn Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've ever become impatient when someone is telling a scary story and long to just blurt out, "Just get to the scary part!", this book is for you. It contains excerpts from many longer frightening tales but only includes the actual scary part of each. The frightening aspects of these scary parts are somewhat diminished because we don't have all the suspenceful build up that a longer telling of the tale would provide. And the title, "The Wrong Turning," refers to the point in every scary story in which the main character has a choice and takes the wrong one. When a group of friends tries to spend the night in a haunted house and they hear a noise upstairs, they have a choice--call Uber and get the heck out of there, or go up, armed only with a lighted candle, to investigate. They grab the candlestick and reconnoiter every time. If they didn't, there wouldn't be any story to tell. Some old classics, like "The Monkey's Paw," still pack a wallop althought we all have heard it in its many iterations at every camp or slumber party we've ever attended. This is a compact little scary book that isn't that scary. Sort of Horror Lite.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Without a doubt the most poorly written intro in the history of intros. As for the collection, it was pretty disappointing. Not really spooky, not really much about ghosts…An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a great story but not at all about ghosts. And Moonimpappa at Sea? Seriously? I liked that the story excerpts were short and that there were intros for each one. But apart from that, there must be better collections of ghost stories.

[Kez · Rating 3 out of 5]

perhaps in need of more criticism interwoven with the extracts but a great collection of pieces selected with refreshing and interesting ponderings of depictions of 'ghosts', hauntings and the unsettling throughout a variety of literature.