The ghost files

Whenever I look out the front windows, I can see a house with three ghosts... four, if you count one in the stone wall. And I not long ago heard a ghost story about my federal era house. But I've written about those and other Cooperstown ghosts before. Here's a brand new one. Last week I was sitting outside on a bench when S. came by, walking a dog. She told me that her youngest son had been dog-sitting at a house down the street, one that had been a medical clinic in the late nineteenth century.

The day before, her son G. had walked the dog and taken it back in the house. But as he turned away from the dog in the shadowy entrance hall, he realized that a woman was standing close behind him. Alas, he bolted for the door and did not engage her in cross-species chitchat.

Ghosts of Christmas past

In the tradition of the scholarly M.R. James, who always read a marvelous new one of his own composing at Christmas, it's time for a ghost story. And here's a new review of Ghosts by Gaslight,edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers. Must say about my mention that this is the first reviewer to imply that there might be a relationship between the mode in which the story is told and the identity of the narrator...

Evidently poet, professor, and twin (very ghostly, that!) Damian Walford Davies has started a Christmas Eve (or thereabouts) reading series featuring James stories by candlelight at the University of Aberystwyth. I wonder how many places have revived the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas--a wonderful idea.

Ghosts by Gaslight materializing--



A Publishers Weekly Top Ten
SF, Fantasy, and Horror Pick for the Fall.
Pub date: September 6

GHOSTS

The ghost story has a great tradition that twines together the literary and the speculative, those often-battling or sneering-at-each-other genres.  No matter what sort of writer one is, the job of taking a hoary old device like the ghost and making it work the current day is a challenge. And whether you have a love for Henry James or M. R. James or some other ghost-conjurer, there are grand tales to be read.

Thanks to Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for soliciting a story from me for their soon-to-be-launched anthology. And I suspect that if you like Hawthorne, you'll like my story, "The Grave Reflection."

INTERESTING COMPANY

1."The Iron Shroud" by James Morrow
2."Music, When Soft Voices Die" by Peter S. Beagle
3."The Shaddowwes Box" by Terry Dowling
4."The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder As Experienced by Sir Magnus Holmes and Almost-Doctor Susan Shrike" by Garth Nix
5."Why I Was Hanged" by Gene Wolfe
6."The Proving of Smollett Standforth" by Margo Lanagan
7."The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star" by Sean Williams
8."Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar" by Robert Silverberg
9."The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn's Balloons" by John Langan
10."Face to Face" by John Harwood
11."Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism" by Richard Harland
12."The Grave Reflection" by Marly Youmans
13."Christopher Raven" by Theodora Goss
14."Rose Street Attractors" by Lucius Shepard
15."Blackwood's Baby" by Laird Barron
16."Mysteries of the Old Quarter" by Paul Park
17."The Summer Palace" by Jeffrey Ford

HARPER-COLLINS FLAP COPY:

Edited by Jack Dann, World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of Dreaming Down Under) and Nick Gevers (acclaimed editor and book reviewer), Ghosts by Gaslight is a showcase collection of all-new stories of steampunk and supernatural suspense by modern masters of horror, fantasy, sf, and the paranormal. An absolutely mind-boggling gathering of some of today’s very best dark storytellers—including Peter Beagle, James Morrow, Sean Williams, Gene Wolfe, Garth Nix, Marly Youmans, Jeffery Ford, and Robert Silverberg—Ghosts by Gaslight offers chilling gothic and spectral tales in a delightfully twisted Victorian and Edwardian vein. Think Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a decidedly steampunk edge, and you’re ready to confront Ghosts by Gaslight.