Showing results for "Ghost Stories" in Anthologies & Short Stories

Long lost to the public in out-of-print pulp magazines, dusty Victorian anthologies, and the pages of now defunct newspapers, these vintage vampire stories have truly proved immortal. Resurrected now for the year 2011, this is a stunning collection of nineteenth-century vampire stories by heavyweights such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Bram Stoker. These rare stories are arranged in chronological order from 1846 to 1913 and are compiled by two of the world's leading vampire anthologists and experts.

Who would suspect that the same mind that created the most famous literary detective of all time also took on the eternally popular genre of vampires? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a contemporary of Bram Stoker, gave us some fascinating works of vampire fiction. From the bloodsucking plant in "The American's Tale" to the bloodsucking wife in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," he reveled in the horror created by creatures who survived on the blood of men and women.

Dorothy Scarborough was an academic and author who had a particular interest in the supernatural. The following collection, first published in 1921, features stories that have a strong comical or satirical focus.

Three Ghost Stories is just that: a collection of three different stories that are true Gothic classics. The three stories, The Signal Man, The Haunted House and The Trial for Murder were sensational for their time and continue to hold up well, thanks to Charles Dickens' superb skills at storytelling. The Signal Man is the most well known of the three, chronicling the haunting of a railroad signal man who is visited by a ghost just before a tragic event is to happen on the railway. If you like Dickens and tales of spectres and the supernatural, you'll love Three Ghost Stories.

From the vaults of the British Library comes a new anthology celebrating the best works of forgotten, never-since-republished supernatural fiction from the early 20th century. Waiting within are malevolent spirits eager to possess the living and mysterious spectral guardians - a diverse host of phantoms exhumed from the rare pages of literary magazines and newspaper serials to thrill once more.

Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Dracula’s Guest (vampires) and The Dead Witness (detectives) have been widely praised, has gathered twelve of the best stories about humanity’s oldest supernatural obsession. The Phantom Coach includes tales by a surprising and often legendary cast, including Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as lost gems by forgotten masters such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and W. F. Harvey. Amelia B. Edwards’s chilling story gives the collection its title, while Ambrose Bierce ("The Moonlit Road"), Elizabeth Gaskell ("The Old Nurse’s Story"), and W. W. Jacobs ("The Monkey’s Paw") will turn you white as a sheet. With a skillful introduction to the genre and notes on each story by Sims, The Phantom Coach is a spectacular collection of ghostly Victorian thrills.

The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James is an omnibus collection of ghost stories. Many of these stories are time-tested classics. Montague Rhodes James is best remembered for his ghost stories, which some consider among the best in the genre. He redefined the ghost story for the new century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. However, his protagonists and plots tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests.

This collection contains a mixture of stories about ghosts and contacts from spirits, some by celebrated authors, together with essays on psychical research. As Joseph French notes in the preface, even for the skeptic, tales of ghostly activity retain a distinct fascination. The widespread interest in psychic phenomena in the early twentieth century proved to be a significant stimulus to literary production.

The supernatural, the surreal, and the all-too real . . . tales of the dark. Such stories have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as...

A mother and her daughter come to the remote Orkneys to grieve and find themselves instead dealing with a ghostly Viking legend. A Dark Ages king doesn’t realise his wife carries another man’s child and she is desperate for him not to find out. A young woman, who has spent her whole life hiding her supernatural strength, discovers on the eve of her wedding that she is Odin’s daughter. Sir Percival’s sister finds herself trapped in a castle of bloodletting sorcerers with only her sexuality as a weapon.

Stories from the masters of the fantasy genre, George MacDonald, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Hood. Tales of fairies, ghosts, and hauntings. These stories have never lost their magic.