Great Ghost Stories [Paperback]

R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Compiler), Stephen Jones (Compiler)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2004

Featuring eerily atmospheric modern tales of foreboding and unease by such contemporary authors as Garry Kilworth, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, Tony Richards, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, as well as disquieting classic ghost stories by literary giants like Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, F. Marion Crawford, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu, this anthology of highly original and often long-obscure works by twenty-five noteworthy masters of the macabre is guaranteed to raise more than a shiver. Gleaned from the renowned Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories series, which was edited from 1972 to 1984 by prolific horror fiction writer and erudite anthologist R. Chetwynd-Hayes, these tales reflect the enduring fascination in our literary tradition with phantoms, specters, ghouls, and wraiths. There's a Fetch, too—in Tina Rath's intricately plotted tale of a violent husband, a shrinking wife, a scheming woman, and a Doppleganger. Behind Guy de Maupassant's simply titled "An Apparition" lurks a tale that Chetwynd-Hayes places among the top ten ghost stories ever written. From Daniel Defoe's entertaining eighteenth-century period piece to the subtle slice of contemporary ghostly life from Stephen King, solace in these remarkable, chilling fictions comes only at the feet of very dark angels.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (July 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786713631
• ISBN-13: 978-0786713639
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,017,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Alright, May 27, 2009

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Reader in Tokyo - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Great Ghost Stories (Paperback)

This book was published in 2004 and collected 25 works by as many authors. It was a selection from among the 193 stories that had appeared in the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, Vols. 9-20, published between 1973 and 1984 under editor Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes. This selection from among the stories in RCH's Fontana series was made by Stephen Jones.

There were 15 authors from Great Britain, 6 from the United States, 2 from Ireland (LeFanu, George Bernard Shaw), 1 from France (Maupassant), and 1 anonymous contribution.

The earliest work was by DeFoe, from the 1720s. From the early to mid-1800s, there were Walter Scott, Washington Irving, LeFanu and Amelia Edwards. Those from the late 1800s to the 1920s included Shaw, Maupassant, Edith Nesbit, Bierce and F. Marion Crawford, with token humor provided by Jerome K. Jerome and John Kendrick Bangs. For the period from 1930s to the mid-1960s, no pieces were selected. Representing the tail end of the 1960s was an early work by Stephen King. Writers from the 1970s and 80s included Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, Tina Rath, Steve Rasnic Tem and RCH himself. Of all the stories in the collection, roughly two-thirds came from the 1920s or before, with the remainder from the late 1960s to 80s.

Jones's introduction mentioned a boom in the horror field in Great Britain in the 1960s and 70s, which led to a number of anthologies edited by Robert Aickman, Christine Bernard, Mary Danby, RCH and others, containing classic ghost and horror tales, tales from Cornwall, Scotland and Wales, even tales from outer space. RCH took over the Fontana series of ghost stories from Aickman in 1972, and in this series his distinction was to begin including a greater number of newer pieces by established contemporaries, in addition to reprints of authors from the Victorian and Edwardian periods, plus a larger number of stories in each volume.

The British horror boom ended, and RCH's series was discontinued, around 1984, in the wake of more visceral contemporary horror from the best-selling authors of the time: "[RCH's] more genteel phantoms were simply unable to co-exist in a world that was only interested in reading about children with psychic powers and mutant vermin." Given the passage of time since then, the present anthology was intended to revive some of the stories from the series and keep alive RCH's name.

There were a lot of morality tales (Irving, Edwards, Baring-Gould, Bounds, King, RCH, Rath), as well as ghostly occurrences, explained or unexplained (DeFoe, Scott, LeFanu, Shaw, Maupassant, Nesbit, Middleton, Northcote, Campbell), various other evils such as a curse, a poltergeist and some type of black magic (Crawford, Rasnic Tem, Richards), a piece about transference of souls (Lumley) and two humorous interludes (Jerome, Bangs). A story by Garry Kilworth appeared to contain a ghost that turned out to be something else. A story by Bierce, "The Moonlit Road," described a series of tragic events from multiple, conflicting points of view. It was fascinating for its construction and may have been one of the inspirations behind Akutagawa's "In a Grove," filmed later as Rashomon.

Two of the stories chilled me: Rath's modern morality tale involving a double, and Crawford's much older work about a family curse, which had an atmosphere that overcame everything else. It would've been enjoyable to read more tales involving the more psychologically complex, atmospheric, or darkly ironic -- by writers such as William Sansom and David A. Riley, Elizabeth Walter and Tanith Lee, and Patricia Highsmith -- but except for Walter these authors never made it into the Fontana series.

Another selection from RCH's Fontana series is Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories (2006), with 24 other stories. This and the present anthology offer good ways to sample Vols. 9-20 of the Fontana series, for those who are interested.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite collections, February 3, 2007

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Cullen W. Monk "CM" (Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Great Ghost Stories (Paperback)

I really cannot find any stories in this collection that I did not like. Each story is unique and enjoyable.
In this collection, you'll find tragic stories of spirits seeking to bring justice to their killers as well as malevolent ghosts who simply seek to attack or torment the living. Not all stories end well for the storytellers though.

You won't find gory or raunchy stories in here that you find in alot of current horror writing and that is just another reason why this is a fresh of breath air. So much horror today seems to try and shock you with the obscene more than they try to scare you with the truly supernatural.

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Ghost Stories, November 7, 2011

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Brendan Moody (Randolph, ME, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Great Ghost Stories (Paperback)

At the risk of sounding like one of those bloggers for whom every review is a fragment of autobiography, I think I should say that I bought Great Ghost Stories only because there happened to be a cheap secondhand copy that would use up the balance of an eBay gift certificate. A few days after it arrived, my mother happened to see it on my shelf, and I had so little interest in it that I immediately lent it to her. As with Haunts, also a ghost story anthology by Stephen Jones, she was roundly impressed with it and I, when I finally got around to reading it, felt rather less so. But, considering that I barely wanted the anthology in the first place, really it delivered more than I had anticipated.

Great Ghost Stories draws on the twelve volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes between 1973 and 1984. In addition to older stories, Chetwynd-Hayes also published recent or original work by contemporary writers, including himself. (In this he was to some extent following the precedent set by the editor of the first eight Fontana Book volumes, Robert Aickman, who included his own stories in several of those volumes. This does suggest a healthy ego, but at least history has justified Aickman's judgment.) As I'm not, with a few exceptions, much of a fan of the pre-20th century ghost story, I had expected to find the contemporary stories more involving. But the opposite was true. Although a few of the earlier stories are more technically interesting than frightening, most can still bring on a shiver, and they've stood the test of time better than the newer pieces, which are solid but far from great ghost stories.

I had high hopes for the opening story, "The Four-Fifteen Express," as its author, Amelia B. Edwards, is one of the few ghost story writers prior to M. R. James whose work I've enjoyed. But this story is short on eerieness and long on the gradual working-out of things that an alert modern reader will already have guessed. The narrative structure is by now so commonplace that it would take a more developed atmosphere than Edwards provides to overcome the sense of familiarity. That's even more true of Sir Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber," an oft-reprinted story whose outline-- the houseguest, the disused chamber, the terrible experience, the corroborating discovery-- is by now so well-worn that the only way to find any interest in it is to foist onto it a psychosexual interpretation. A few other stories likewise roll along capably but without much interest.

But the older stories that fail to inspire are outweighed by those that offer at least a flash of the real thing. Richard Middleton's "On the Brighton Road" is another frequently-reprinted tale, but it has enough concentrated creepiness and contemporary relevance to overcome the curse of familiarity. "The Whittakers Ghost" by one G.B.S. manages to turn the lack of explanation common to a "true" ghost story into a virtue rather than a vice, creating an air of mysterious doom around what is really a standard haunting. Mystery also drives Guy de Maupassant's "An Apparition." One cannot say why that ghost should want what it does, and that makes the already disturbing request even more urgently terrifying. F. Marion Crawford's "The Dead Smile" is really more a Gothic tale than a ghost story, but it's a good one, with Gothic flourishes that are milder than usual, and all the more creepy for that. Two comic ghost stories, by John Kendrick Bangs and Jerome K. Jerome, balance the horrors nicely.

The 20th-century stories tend to feel disposable by comparison. Ramsey Campbell's "The Ferries," while perhaps a trifle overlong, is pretty spooky, but the rest lack both the pure chill of classic stories and the psychological or philosophical complexity of the best modern work. As Stephen Jones notes in his foreword, Stephen King's "The Reaper's Image" was, as a story by the bestselling author not previously published in Britain, quite a coup at the time of its Fontana Book appearance. But a few decades on, and after its republication in King's collection Skeleton Crew, "The Reaper's Image" is more a curiosity than anything else. Considering the author's youth (he was twenty-one at the time), its by-and-large competent crafting is impressive, but that doesn't make it a great ghost story, or even a particularly good one. Brian Lumley's "Aunt Hester," more Lovecraftian than ghostly, proceeds gamely towards its obvious conclusion, which it describes with an overdose of italics and exclamation points! Sydney J. Bounds' "The Night Walkers" is so rudimentary in its concept and execution that I can barely understand why it was chosen for the original Fontana Book, let alone for this later culling.

Other stories are engaging, quite successful as products of their time, but lack the heft that would make them memorable. Those who (as I do) admire Steve Rasnic Tem's psychologically intense horror fiction will appreciate "Housewarming," but it's not one of his more powerful or surreal stories. Tina Rath's "The Fetch" involves a macabre scheme and a final twist that wouldn't be out of place on The Twilight Zone, but its cleverness replaces rather than complements anything truly frightening. Chetwynd-Hayes' own "She Walks on Dry Land" features a less-than-fully-successful pastiche of Regency style that nonetheless brings a cruelly ironic charm to another thoroughly traditional haunting.

In the end, I think Great Ghost Stories falls short of its title. Only a few of its stories can really be called great. But greatness in the ghost story is, after all, a rare commodity. Robert Aickman's contention that there were only a few dozen examples in the English language was too pessimistic, but not by much, and many of the best examples have been so endlessly reprinted as to lose much of their effect. And as a sample of ghost stories, especially pre-modern ones, that exist just below the level of greatness (as so many fine stories must), this anthology is well worth reading.