Readers Digest – Great Ghost Stories

Readers Digest – Great Ghost Stories (Readers Digest, 1997)

Robert Wheeler & Tony Stone

The Editors – Introduction

Robert Aickman – Ringing The Changes
Cynthia Asquith – The Corner Shop
A. L. Barker – The Whip Hand
Ambrose Bierce – A Tough Tussle
Algernon Blackwood – Transition
Ray Bradbury – The Crowd
Ann Bridge – The Buick Saloon
Rhoda Broughton – The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth
A. M. Burrage – Smee
A. S. Byatt – The July Ghost
B. M. Croker – ‘To Let’
Robertson Davies – The Ghost Who Vanished By Degrees
Walter de la Mare – Seaton’s Aunt
Charles Dickens – No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman
Lord Dunsany – August Cricket
Elizabeth Fancett – The Ghost Of Calagou
Frederick Forsyth – The Shepherd
Shamus Frazer  – Florinda
Elizabeth Gaskell – The Old Nurse’s Story
Graham Greene – A Little Place Of The Edgware Road
L. P. Hartley – Someone In The Lift
William Hope Hodgson – The Gateway Of The Monster
Thomas Hood – The Shadow Of A Shade
Holloway Horn – The Old Man
Elizabeth Jane Howard – Three Miles Up
Henry James – The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes
M. R. James – The Ash Tree
Rudyard Kipling – The Phantom Rickshaw
Marghanita Laski – The Tower
J. S. le Fanu – Shalken The Painter
Penelope Lively – Black Dog
Alison Lurie – The Highboy
W. Somerset Maugham – The Taipan
Guy de Maupassant – An Apparition
E. Nesbit – Man-size In Marble
Edgar Allan Poe – William Wilson
Alexander Pushkin – The Queen Of Spades
Jean Rhys – I Used To Live Here Once
Robert Louis Stevenson – The Body-snatcher
Bram Stoker – The Judge’s House
Elizabeth Taylor – Poor Girl
H. R. Wakefield – Blind Man’s Buff
Elizabeth Walter – Dual Control
Fay Weldon – Breakages
Oscar Wilde – The Canterville Ghost
Emile Zola – Angeline, or The Haunted House

Blurb:

If you enjoy reading about elusive spirits and uncanny happenings, bizarre hauntings and malevolent ghosts, this is the volume for you. It brings together forty-six of the very best ghost stories ever written.

There are unforgettable classics from the great masters of the ghost story such as M. R. James, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Nesbit and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Then there are wonderfully macabre tales from world-famous authors such as Charles Dickens, Alexander Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant and Graham Greene, as well as gems from some of today’s best writers including Ray Bradbury, A. S. Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Penelope Lively, Fay Weldon and Frederick Forsyth.

This is a collection to entertain and intrigue, to terrify and to tantalise … to chill you to the bone. You have been warned!

C. A. Dawson Scott & Ernest Rhys – Twenty And Three Stories

C. A. Dawson Scott & Ernest Rhys (eds.) – Twenty And Three Stories: By Twenty And Three Authors (Thornton Butterworth, 1924)

 

Introduction: Ernest Rhys & C. A. Dawson Scott

Edith Wharton – Kerfol
L. de Bra – A Life – A Bowl Of Rice
W. B. Yeats – The Crucifixion Of The Outcast
The Marquess Curzon Of Kedleston – The Drums Of Kairwan
T. F. Powys – Alleluia
A. E. W. Mason – Hatteras
Elinor Mordaunt – Hodge
Thomas Burke – The Chink And The Child
Robert Hichens – The Nomad
Cutcliffe Hyne – The Ransom
Edwin Pugh – The Other Twin
Morley Roberts – Grear’s Dam
Ward Muir – The Reward Of Enterprise
H. de Vere Stackpoole -The King Of Maleka
Algernon Blackwood – Violence
A. Conan-Doyle – Captain Sharkey
Arthur Lynch – The Sentimental Mortgage
Ellis Roberts – The Narrow Way
Louis Golding – The Call Of The Hand
Walter De La Mare – The Creatures
W. Somerset Maugham – The Taipan
John Masefield – Davy Jones’ Gift
W. W. Jacobs – The Monkey’s Paw

“The New Terror is apt to be more psychical, more psychological perhaps, than the old. The method of the latter is based on EDGAR POE and the writers for Blackwoods Magazine, while the former is akin to the Russians, to SOLOGUB and TCHEKKOV.”

Strong mixed bag of Ghost stories, mysteries and thrillers – “stories of sensation” as the authors put it – with enough of a horror bent to be included here. A companion piece to their Thirty And One Stories of the previous year which is more diverse in its approach but still finds time to include genre contributions from Percival Gibbon, Violet Hunt, May Sinclair and H. G. Wells of those I recognise.

Cynthia Asquith – Shudders

Cynthia Asquith (ed.) – Shudders: A Collection Of New Nightmare Tales (Hutchinson, 1929)

L.P Hartley – The Travelling Grave
Hilda Hughes – Those Whom The Gods Love
E.F Benson – The Hanging Of Alfred Wadham
Walter de la Mare – Crewe
Arthur Machen – The Cosy Room
Huge Walpole – The Snow
Elizabeth Bowen – The Cat Jumps
M.R James – Rats
Algernon Blackwood – The Stranger
C.H.B Kitchin – Dispossession
Shame Leslie – The Lord-In-Waiting
W.B Maxwell – The Last Man In
W.Somerset Maugham – The End Of The Flight
Mrs Belloc Lowndes – Her Judgment Day
Cynthia Asquith – The Playfellow