The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories

by Alberto Manguel

Offering hours and hours of delightful terror, this marvelous collection of twenty-four classic Canadian ghost stories ranges from the work of early masters such as Stephen Leacock and Mazo de la Roche, to contemporary writers such as Margaret Atwood, Timothy Finlay, Brian Moore, and
Audrey Thomas.
Including such well-known tales as W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa --the story on which the blockbuster movie, Field of Dreams , was based--and other stories by such renowned writers as Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant, and Jane Rule, this collection presents the very best in
the genre. Capturing Canada's own unique literary tradition, it provides translations of stories by influential French-Canadian writers. It also contains Philippe Aubert de Gaspe's La Corriveau , John Charles Dent's The Gerrard Street Mystery , Honore Beaugrand's La Fantome de l'avare , W.H. Blake's A
Tale of the Grand Jardin , Gilbert Parker's The Flood , Duncan Campbell Scott's Vengeance is Mine , Ethel Wilson's Mr. Sleepwalker , A.M. Klein's No Traveller Returns... , Farley Mowat's The Snow Walker , Virgil Burnett's Fallowfields , Antonine Maillet's The Ghost of Lovers Lane , Alistair MacLeod's As
Birds Bring Forth the Sun , Eric McCormack's No Country for Old Men , Sean Virgo's Haunt , Tim Wynne-Jones' The Woman with the Lounge-Act Hair , and Rohington Mistry's The Ghost of Firozsha Baag .

Genres: Horror, Anthologies

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).

Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.

Reviews

[[on hiatus, probably forever] The rockabilly werewolf from Mars · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I've lived in Canada my entire life, I don't really like the so-called "canlit" genre. I know that a bunch of squares are about to accuse me of heresy, but I really don't enjoy canlit. Although good writing is done in Canada (including quite good horror fiction, by authors such as Gemma Files, David Nickle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Michael Rowe, etc.), the majority of canadian literature consists of trite, dreary (in a bad way), self-indulgent stories about sad middle-aged people living sad lives in sad towns without giving us any reason to care about the events in the story (I have a similar problem with the Canadian film industry: for every movie like Videodrome or My Bloody Valentine or Hobo With A Shotgun or even Terror Train we get hundreds of soul-draining documentaries that seem to appeal only to film critics). Unfortunately for me, although I really like ghost stories, most of these were written in the awful style associated with canlit. Furthermore, most of these stories weren't remotely frightening; which, as a devotee of the M. R. James tradition of ghost stories, was profoundly disappointing. There were a few interesting stories (the Atwood, Mowat, and maybe 3 or 4 others), but none of them were necessarily stories I would actively look for. I don't have anything against the editor though, the field he had to work with seems to be rather limited, and the other anthology that I have read by this editor (Black Water) was superb.

Update: I got this out from the library again, and would probably increase the rating to a 2.5 (although I don't like canlit any more than I did before). In the interest of completion, I feel that it's my duty to give notes on the stories, because I seem to be one of the only people who has read this. So:

La Corriveau
Some guy recounts his father's encounter with a witch. This seemed like an excerpt from a longer work.

The Gerrard Street Mystery
One of those "ghost reveals evidence leading to solution of a crime" stories that were so popular in the Victorian era but have vanished from the modern horror genre. Not really my favourite type of ghost story.

The Miser's Ghost
Very moralistic story about a traveler who stays the night at a house only to discover that the resident is a ghost.

A Tale Of The Grand Jardin
A man goes fishing at a remote lake, a storm comes in, and he encounters something in the woods. This would have been much better if the supernatural elements were more prominent in the story; other than a cursory description of wendigo legends, all of the horror elements were in the last few paragraphs. As it stands, the story is rather insubstantial.

The Flood
A man is haunted by the sound of water after committing a murder.

Vengeance Is Mine
I couldn't get into this one at all. I can handle either phonetically spelled accents or frequent religious references in a story (although I prefer them to have neither), but not both.

Buggam Grange
A man stays the night in a haunted house. I believe that this is meant as a parody of Victorian ghost stories; I found it mildly amusing.

Portrait Of A Wife
An artist is hired to paint a dying woman as part of a bizarre revenge plot. This reminded me of a cross between The Oval Portrait, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, and The Girl With The Hungry Eyes. I found the characters' reactions in the final scene improbably melodramatic.

Mr. Sleepwalker
A woman starts noticing a strange man in various places, which leaves her vaguely unsettled. I'm not quite sure if I quite understood this; there didn't actually seem to be a ghost in the end. If it was supernatural, which I'm not sure if it was, I would classify it as a werewolf story rather than a ghost story. Still, probably my favourite so far.

No Traveler Returns
A man believes that he is being pursued by the ghost of a murderous doctor. The writer is evidently fond of similes, judging by the almost constant use of them in the story.