Haining, Peter, ed. The Mammoth Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories. Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1998.
Reason read: November 1st is Day of the Dead in Mexico. Read in honor of ghosts everywhere.
The stories:
The Golden Era –
- “The Third Person” by Henry James – two spinster women live together in a haunted house.
- “The Presence By the Fire” by H.G. Wells – a man mourns the loss of his wife.
- “How It Happened” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – a man crashes his brand new car.
- “Ghostly Duel” by Jack London – published in the Oakland Aegis and renamed “Who Believes in Ghosts?”
- “The Hand” by Theodore Dreiser
- “The Ghost of Down Hill” by Edgar Wallace – Wallace’s short stories were made into movies.
- “Honeysuckle Cottage” by P.G. Wodehouse – no one is who they say they are in this haunted house.
- “The Old Dark House” by J.B. Priestly
- “Sophy Mason Comes Back” by E.M. Delafield – Dorothy Sayers was a fan of Delafield.
- “In a Glass Darkly” by Agatha Christie – a man saves a woman from murder…or does he?
Two: the Phantom Army – - “The Bowman” by Arthur Machen – is this story really fiction when there have been eye witness accounts of the World War I phenomenon?
- “The Other Side of the Medal” by Stella Gibbons – another version of the Bowmen story.
- “Three Lines of Old French” by Abraham Merritt – Haining said this could be a benchmark ghost story.
- “The Lusitania Waits” by Alfred Noyes – Noyes was an English poet who, like John Mayer, did not wait to graduate college before becoming famous.
- “Vengeance is Mine” by Algernon Blackwood – a chance encounter with a stranger changes a mild-mannered man’s life.
- “We are the Dead” by Henry Kuttner – from the pulp magazine called Weird Tales.
- “The Escort” by Daphne du Maurier
- “The Elf in Algiers” by John Steinbeck
- “The Mirror in Toom 22” by James Hadley Case – written while Case was serving in the Royal Air Force.
- “Is there Life Beyond the Gravy?” by Stevie Smith
Three: The Modern Tradition – - “Sloane Square” by Pamela Hansford Johnson – a ghostly subway ride.
- “The Leaf-Sweeper” by Muriel Spark – one of my favorites about a man who confronts his living ghost.
- “At the Chalet Lartrec” by Winston Graham – a story about time spent in an isolated mountain hotel.
- “The Love of a Good Woman” by William Trern – mild-mannered salesman murders his wife for the sake of a mistress.
- “The Haunting of Shawley Rectory” by Ruth Rendell – does history repeat itself?
- “Voices From the Coalbin” by Mary Higgins Clark – a woman slowly goes insane thanks to childhood traumas.
- “A Good Sound Marriage” by Fay Weldon – a pregnant woman has a heart to heart with her ghost of a grandmother.
- “A Self-Possessed Woman” by Julian Barnes
- A Programmed Christmas Carol” by John Mortimer – published in the London Daily Mail in 1994.
- “A Figment in Time” by Peter Haining
My favorite observations: the spinsters in “The Third Person” were happy to have a man in the house, even if he was a ghost and in “A Programmed Christmas Carol” a descendant of Scrooge’s is living in the world of Apple computers and paternity leave.
Line I liked, “James Rodman had a congenital horror of matrimony” (p 147), “Rage pertained to savage days” (p 263), “The dangerous thing is for a woman to wait too long, so she end with nothing” (p 445)and “Curiously, too, I thought that although a lot of people die naked, I could not find a single story of a nude phantom” (p 480).
Author Editor fact: Haining has over 200 works to his credit. I am only reading The Mammoth Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories for the Challenge.
Music: “Good-bye to Tipperary,” “The Holly and the Ivy,” “Lillibullero,” “The Rogue’s March,”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the very obvious chapter called “Ghost Stories” (p 99).
~*LunaSea*~ 