Customer Reviews

Here There Be Ghosts

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Middle readers who are looking for a shiver or two will find them in Jane Yolen's Here There Be Ghosts.

This spectacularly spine-tingling volume presents a choir teacher who has recently gone to join the heavenly choir. There's also a prom date that never should have happened plus a host of other tales.

Jane Yolen knows how to throw scares into us, and she does so with gusto in this collection.

Too often, ghost stories either degenerate into sappy emotional dramas or into gruesome near-parodies. Jane Yolen deftly avoids those traps in a collection of poems and stories that is never gruesome, never sappy, and never really scary.

"It Was the Hour" is a poem about the brief appearance of a ghost. "Ghost Boy" is a highly entertaining story about a pair of kids who get a glimpse of a ghost boy -- but exactly who is the ghost? "Tombmates" is a highly amusing poem about an Odd Couple pair of ghosts -- a tidy one and a messy one. "Police Report" is the account of a kid explaining how a ghost appeared to him, and ending with an amusing twist. "White Lady" is a poetic account about the White Lady ghost who haunts a cathedral. "The Boy Who Sang For Death" is a two-ended story about a young man who pursues Lady Death in an effort to get her to resurrect his mother. "Seance for Eight" is an amusing poem about a seance -- is it fake or not? "Mrs. Ambroseworthy" is an amusing-spooky story about a choir director who keeps coming back. "Night Wolves," about a kid and a ghost who "wore my mother's face, my mother's wedding dress" is poignant and sweet.

"The Singer of Seeds" is a little weaker than the others, about the lingering effects of a young man killed by murderous farmers. "In the Silvered Night" is a pretty poem about nothing much, aside from ghosts. "Mandy" is the perfect story for dog-lovers, in which the ghost of a deceased pooch comes to visit her owner. "Haunt" asks the question "When I am gone/Who will I haunt?" "Green Ghosts" has a young girl dealing with strange green creatures who are flittering around like bats in her new home. "Souls" is an exceptional short story, starkly written and simple in its storyline, in which a boy grows up killing things that he decrees have no souls. "The Moon-Ribbon" is a beautifully-written story, somewhat like a fairy tale, in which an apparition helps a young girl named Sylva, whose only possession is a silver ribbon. "Prom Ghost" is when a girl finds out how her brother and the girl he was with died on their prom night. And "My Own Ghosts" is a charming little finale to the collection.

There isn't really a weak spot in this collection; Yolen's style ranges from charming fairy-tale-like stories to charming poems to eerie tales with a wry twist. As always, David Wilgus's soft-edged black-and-white drawings add extra dimension to the material collected in it.

For fans of things that go bump in the night, this is good entertainment. One of the best of this too-short series.

I like that these ghost stories are not the usual horrifying, scare-your-pants-off stories that I often come across. The ghosts in these stories don't go around trying to kill people, they are just unusual which for some reason makes them seem more real. It's not they aren't scary, they are just spooky. Good for someone looking for non- bloody ghost stories.