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Ghost Stories
Twenty-two exciting stories from the twilight world of haunted houses and hair-raising spectres are contained in this spine-chilling anthology.
Each tale is illustrated with specially commissioned drawings.
Each tale is illustrated with specially commissioned drawings.
302 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1984
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
10.7k books29.7k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 3, 2024
Excellent collection of ghost stories
April 8, 2025
The two stars are for the stories and illustrations themselves but the presentation here is awful. It feels weird to give such a low score for a book in which I enjoyed the contents but the editors of this volume did a very lazy and haphazard job.
Firstly, the book is riddled with spelling errors throughout that do not show up in other reprints of the stories I have in other volumes. There is also a lack of any kind of information about the stories or authors. In order to fully appreciate the context of a story you at least need to know the publication date and it helps to have a short introduction to the author but neither are present here.
It’s also worth mentioning that though the title of the book is Ghost Stories, more than a few of the included stories are not ghost stories at all.
The book also includes some excellent illustrations but the placement of these means that the events depicted in them are often seen before the event takes place in a story, with one particularly egregious example of an illustration giving away the ending of a story some 5 pages before its conclusion.
There are better ways to experience these stories than this lazy anthology. Avoid.
Firstly, the book is riddled with spelling errors throughout that do not show up in other reprints of the stories I have in other volumes. There is also a lack of any kind of information about the stories or authors. In order to fully appreciate the context of a story you at least need to know the publication date and it helps to have a short introduction to the author but neither are present here.
It’s also worth mentioning that though the title of the book is Ghost Stories, more than a few of the included stories are not ghost stories at all.
The book also includes some excellent illustrations but the placement of these means that the events depicted in them are often seen before the event takes place in a story, with one particularly egregious example of an illustration giving away the ending of a story some 5 pages before its conclusion.
There are better ways to experience these stories than this lazy anthology. Avoid.
January 31, 2021
Some decent stories in this. Can't beat good old fashioned ghost stories
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews