GHOSTLY. Edited by Audrey Niffenegger. Vintage. $35.
SLADE HOUSE. By David Mitchell. Sceptre. $27.99.
THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS. By Stephen King. Hachette. $32.99.
THE HOUSE ON COLD HILL. By Peter James. Macmillan. $29.99.
THE WOMAN IN BLACK AND OTHER GHOST STORIES. By Susan Hill. Profile Books. $29.99.
THE LAND OF THE GREEN MAN. By Carolyne Larrington. I B Tauris. $68.
ATLAS OF CURSED PLACES. By Olivier Le Carrer and Sibylle Le Carrer. Black Dog. $29.99.
Ghostly, edited by Audrey Niffenegger, the bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife, is an excellent collection of 16 ghost stories from authors including Edgar Allen Poe, M. R. James, Edith Wharton, Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman. Niffenegger illustrates and introduces each story, including her own A Secret Life With Cats. Subject matter ranges from the Gothic to psychological hauntings. Niffenegger concludes, "Ghost stories are speculations, little experiments in death . . . literature of loneliness and longing". Children are a staple ingredient in ghost stories, as best evidenced in The Turn of the Screw. The short stories from Rudyard Kipling and A.S. Byatt underpin the reality of their losses of children.
David Mitchell's new book, Slade House, which began as a Twitter story and has links to his other novels, comprises five linked novellas, covering 1979 to 2015. Mitchell follows a predatory brother and sister, born in 1899, who every nine years must find victims and "decant" their souls in order to retain their youth. Slade House, a mysterious London manor house, is itself a ghost, only emerging every nine years as a location for each psychical Groundhog Day. Mitchell's characters are superbly evoked. Reader empathy heightens the tension, knowing the eventual outcome, until the final surprising twist in the story.
Less original is Peter James's The House on Cold Hill. James is best known for his bestselling Roy Grace Brighton crime series, but began his career with supernatural novels. While well- paced, The House on Cold Hill offers little new in its haunted-house scenario. Web designer Ollie Harcourt, his wife Caro and 12-year-old daughter Jade move from Brighton to an old run-down country house with a dark past. Caro and Jade's unhappiness at their relocation deepens when they meet apparently dead characters and the past seeps into the present with dire consequences.
The collected ghost stories of Susan Hill, evoking memories of M.R. James, are much more subtle and sublime. Hill's classic The Woman in Black, with its powerful story of family loss, not only spawned a long-running West End play but also the recent movie with Daniel Radcliffe. Hill sets her stories in suitably atmospheric historical settings, such as a foggy Victorian London in Printers Devil Court, where medical students experiment in bringing the dead back to life. Dolly is set in the bleak English Fens. The remote Yorkshire moors are juxtaposed with Venice in The Man in the Picture, in which an 18th-century century oil painting of a Venetian carnival reaches out over the centuries, literally incorporating its victims. An excellent collection.
Stephen King's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, with an AC/DC dedication, brings together 20 short stories, each with a personal introduction from King. While many stories echo real-life horror, others conjure up the supernatural. Bad Little Kid is literally that, a child who never ages, whom King calls "the evil version of Sluggo". In The Dune, an elderly judge visits a remote sand dune on which names mysteriously appear, foreshadowing the named person's death. In similar vein, in Obits, a tabloid obituary writer finds his drafts trigger the individual's death. King questions the morality of mortality and never disappoints in his readability.
Oxford academic Carolyne Larrington explores the British cultural landscape and psyche through myths, legends and folk stories in the impressive The Land of the Green Man, subtitled A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles. Larrington mixes personal memories of landscape with deep scholarship, in a text that ranges widely over geographical locations, historical folklore and their creative interpretations. Authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, and J. K. Rowling are used to illustrate subjects, often in unusual ways. Thus, her history of changelings concludes with Irving Welsh's Acid House.
Subject matter ranges from the familiar, such as fairies, ogres, witches, giants, mermaids, elves and goblins to the relatively unfamiliar, such as "knockers, boggarts, land-wights and Jack o' Lanterns". The last chapter, The Green Man, traces its origins well before its symbolic adoption by the green movement. Larrington effectively outlines the British boundaries between the "natural" and the "supernatural".
Olivier Le Carrer's Atlas of Cursed Places, subtitled A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations, is a curious mixture of 40 real and the unreal sites. Real-life "cursed" places include Cape York, "the land of the killer crocodiles" and Gaza, "a territory adrift". Paranormal sites include the Strait of Messina, home of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the poltergeist of Tennessee's Bell Witch and the forbidden cemetery of Stull, Kansas. Unfortunately, impact is lessened, as Le Carrer's short chapters often assume a background knowledge and Sibylle Le Carrer's historically fashioned maps lack the underpinning which photographs might have provided. This is not so much an atlas, but rather a quirky collection of the abnormal.
