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Scary tales and eerie presences.
The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story
By Susan Hill
Set on an English moor in the not-too-distant, yet suitably murky, past, this fine tale -- complete with fog, a hidden past, and, of course, a haunted house -- follows a young solicitor who comes from London to attend the funeral and settle the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow. What he doesn’t know . . . well, you get the picture.
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
By M.R. James
James’s classic tales -- in which, often, a scholarly sort stumbles into uncanny encounters while puttering about a library or country house -- are splendidly elegant, chilling, and creepy; they’re top-notch entertainments for a winter’s evening. This is the first of two volumes of the master’s complete ghost stories.
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
By Edith Wharton
“Till I was twenty-seven or -eight,” the great novelist of manners and social forces once wrote, “I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story.” She conquered her fear long enough to write some unforgettable examples of the genre herself, as this eerie and artful collection of eleven stories proves.
By Sheridan Le Fanu
The Dublin-born Le Fanu (1814-1873) remains among the most accomplished and influential ghost story writers of all time. This spine-tingling volume presents five cases of Dr. Hesselius, a “metaphysical” doctor drawn to patients teetering on the perilous border between the hallucinatory and the supernatural.
By Thorne Smith
In this madcap 1920s comedy, the ghosts are George and Marion Kerby, a merry couple who remain irrepressible even after their death in a car accident. Haunting the automobile they died in, they do their spirited best to rescue its new owner, bank manager Cosmo Topper, from the boring predictability of his straitlaced life.
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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