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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good stories, few ghosts,
By E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (Paperback)
Through the 1970s, Fontana published a remarkable skein of ghost story collections, piloted by R. Aikman and later by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, no mean supernatural authors themselves. Some of the paperbacks in this series, which winds its way up to the "20th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories" are now collectors' items and worth over a hundred dollars apiece. I'm still kicking myself for not saving all of the volumes I bought while we were on an extended stay in Great Britain.
Unfortunately, this seventh book in the series is an exception to the general rule of excellence. I think perhaps the editor was running out of ghost stories and took a turn into weird fiction to pad out the collection. Surreal tales are to be found in abundance, but very few phantasms. These are the stories in the 7th Fontana Book: "Levitation" by Joseph Payne Brennan--A magician dies suddenly after causing a volunteer from his rural audience to rise into the air. "Dearth's Farm" by Gerald Bullett--Atmospheric tale of a man who visits his recently wedded cousin on her husband's farm. Why is her husband beginning to resemble his favorite horse? "Esmeralda" by John Keir Cross--Here's a shabby little shocker, as they used to say about "Tosca." A man strangles his wife and buries her in the basement of his tobacco shop. He is then haunted by his fantasy daughter, who seems to know all of his sordid little sexual secrets. "The Dead Valley" by Ralph Adams Cram--A story from the school of Algernon Blackwood about Nature gone bad. Two boys hike over the hills to Hallsburg to buy a puppy, and are not able to make it home by sunset. They stumble across a valley where nothing seems to be alive. "The Visit to the Museum" by Vladimir Nabokov--A man visits a dusty little French museum at the request of a friend and somehow ends up in Stalin's Russia. I think Nabokov wrote this story because he could. "Gone Away" by A.E. Coppard--Three English friends who are touring France disappear one by one, the last of them while locked in a prison cell. "Governor Manco and the Soldier" by Washington Irving--A Spanish foot soldier appears outside of Grenada with a fine Arabian horse and a saddlebag full of treasure. His tale of ghostly Muslim soldiers who are waiting under the mountain to retake Grenada earns him a trip to jail. "The Cicerones" by Robert Aickman--A man is locked inside a Belgian cathedral during lunch hour with several unusual guides. This story by the editor is by far the most frightening in the book. Why is it that tourists in cathedrals always take it upon themselves to wander down into the crypt? "Old Mrs. Jones" by Mrs. Riddell--This author was a respected writer of Victorian supernatural fiction, but she was obviously being paid by the word for this story. It is a 43-page tale of a cab-driver and his family who are living beyond their means in a large house that was once inhabited by a wicked doctor. "Over an Absinthe Bottle" by W. C. Morrow--A young man who is starving to death on the streets of San Francisco is invited to share a bottle of absinthe by a cadaverous-looking gambler. "Where the Woodbine Twineth" by Davis Grubb--All ghost story collections seem to include at least one child who claims to have companions no one else can see. This is one of the best tales of that difficult subgenre.
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