Bring on the Horror Stories!

               

                 First, I want to apologize for skipping last week.  Things have been kind of crazy getting ready for Olivia to arrive.  We’re getting down to the wire, they’ll be inducing me in about three weeks!  I can’t believe how fast time is going right now!

                Anyway, what you’re really here for is a new book review.  This week I’m going to be reviewing the collection of short horror stories I finished up last week, Ghostly.  The book was edited by Audrey Niffenegger and contains 16 short ghost stories written by various authors.  There are a couple of stories that you see quite often in collections like these.  I feel like “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, and “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions have been pretty widely read.  Most of the collection were by authors I haven’t heard of or stories by known authors that I haven’t read.  Since I read a lot, horror especially, when I pick up collections like this I typically see a lot of the same stories over and over again so it was refreshing to pick up a collection that contained mostly stories I haven’t read.

                There were a couple of stories that stood out to me because they were genuinely creepy.  “The Mezzotint” by M. R. James is a story about a mezzotint with a creepy visitor.  Not to give anything away, but imagining the changes that occur within the drawing throughout the course of the story made it a very scary read.  “August 2026:  There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury was also especially creepy, even though it isn’t really a ghost story.  It’s one of those stories that makes you think about the things that are going on in the world today and how horrific the possible outcomes could be.  “The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link was also quite good, and an interesting take on the traditional haunted house story.  The dead game that the twin girls enjoy playing is disturbing enough even before you add in all the strange things that begin to occur within the home they’re living in.

                I found two of the stories included to be pretty humorous, which surprised me since this was a book of ghost stories.  “Laura” and “The Open Window” by Saki put a funny twist on the ghostly theme of this collection.  In “Laura” a dead woman comes back to harass her friend’s husband, and in “The Open Window” a traveler is tricked by a mischievous young lady.  I’ve never read anything by Saki before, but I may look up more of his work because I really enjoyed these two stories. 

                I really enjoyed this collection and I recommend it to anyone who’s looking to get started on their Halloween reading.  I love to read creepy stories and scary novels around this time of the year.  Fall is my favorite season and Halloween is my favorite holiday so I like nothing better than curling up under a blanket with some hot tea and reading a good scary story.  This was the perfect book to do that with!