Ghostly
A Collection of Ghost Stories
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Audrey Niffenegger, bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife, invites you to creep through haunted houses and commune with the undead in this anthology of all things ghostly.
Haunted houses, spectral chills, and of course, the odd cat. . .
In this volume, Audrey Niffenegger has brought together her selection of the very creepiest, weirdest and wittiest ghost stories around.
Scare yourself silly with old favourites by Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. Entertain the unnerving with tales from Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link and Audrey Niffenegger herself. And as bedtime nears, allay your fears with funny new writing from Amy Giacalone and the classic wit of Saki.
When the nights draw in and the fire burns low, enjoy the eeriness, the dread and the comedy of all things ghostly.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife) assembles ghostly fictions by writers both classic (Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, M.R. James) and recent (Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, A.S. Byatt) in this strong but sometimes uneven anthology. Felines feature prominently in Poe's "The Black Cat" as well as in Niffenegger's own contribution, "Secret Life, with Cats." Humor is provided by P.G. Wodehouse's hilarious "Honeysuckle Cottage" and Amy Giacalone's "Tiny Ghosts," which introduces an irrepressible new voice. Writers who experience ghostly encounters are examined in the longest story, Oliver Onions's "The Beckoning Fair One," and Rebecca Curtis's self-consciously postmodern "The Pink House." The final story, Ray Bradbury's postapocalyptic classic "There Will Come Soft Rains," astonishingly anticipates today's smart-house technology and tells the haunting story of a house that is itself a ghost. Niffenegger includes crisp introductions that provide context, such as that both Rudyard Kipling's "They" and Byatt's "The July Ghost" were written in response to experiencing the death of a child. Some of the older stories are more musty than scary, but the best, such as Gaiman's very short "Click-Clack the Rattlebag," do an excellent job of evoking that crucial frisson of dread.
