I will also grant that confounded expectations are central to both horror and comedy, but this isn't scary and I'm not laughing.

I like to think of myself as broad-minded, but when the title of an anthology is Ghost Stories I don't think I'm wrong in forming a certain expectation of the book's contents. Hartley's W.S., which sees a writer stalked by one of his own characters Edith Wharton's The Looking Glass, which follows a woman who claims to be clairvoyant so that she can bring comfort to her lovesick friend in the form of fake messages from her deceased lover and Alison Lurie's The Highboy, in which a woman is convinced she must treat her furniture with the utmost care, lest it try to kill her. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, which sees a family come into possession of the mysterious eponymous object which grants its owners three wishes, though at a heavy cost, in a classic of the 'be careful what you wish for' trope L.P. There are some real gems to be found here, however.

So overall, I have to say this didn't creep me out anywhere near as much as I'd hoped and I think perhaps the editor tried to be a little too alternative with regards to interpreting the supposed genre.

Others however are comedies, literary stories with little or no otherworldliness, and one or two even a straight-up romance story. It's certainly fair to say that I found the stories in this anthology very much hit-and-miss, and as several other reviewers have said, I think its biggest problem is that however broadly you interpret the theme of 'ghost stories' and however well written some of them may be, several just shouldn't have been included in here.Įven some of the darker tales aren't strictly ghostly, though they do at least have some supernatural or strange goings on.

The Highboy by Alison Lurie