From the Bookshelf of Easley Library Bookworms…

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories

Michael Cox (Editor),

R.A. Gilbert (Editor)

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

No group discussions for this book yet.

What Members Thought

May 29, 2010 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: supernatural-fiction, short-stories

Note, May 4, 2020: When I read short story collections intermittently over a long period of time, my reactions are similarly written piecemeal, while they're fresh in my mind. That gives the reviews a choppy, and often repetitive, quality. Recently, I had to condense and rearrange one of these into a unified whole because of Goodreads' length limit; and I was so pleased with the result that I decided to give every one of these a similar edit! Accordingly, I've now edited this one.

This anthology Note, May 4, 2020: When I read short story collections intermittently over a long period of time, my reactions are similarly written piecemeal, while they're fresh in my mind. That gives the reviews a choppy, and often repetitive, quality. Recently, I had to condense and rearrange one of these into a unified whole because of Goodreads' length limit; and I was so pleased with the result that I decided to give every one of these a similar edit! Accordingly, I've now edited this one.

This anthology collects 42 stories, written between 1829 and 1968. (Where stories by American writers are included, they mostly have British settings/characters, and all follow the formal features of the English tradition.) Oxford Univ. Press, of course, is noted for the literary quality of its anthologies, and this one didn't disappoint on that score! In keeping with the scholarly bent of the publisher, the editors provide a good short introduction to the fictional ghost story, with particular reference to the British Isles --where, as they note, this sub-genre has flowered more fully than in any other country. Not surprisingly, the roster of contributors reads like a roll call of significant writers active in this area over a 140-year span. Individual stories were selected with an eye to the needs both of the seasoned fan and the reader new to ghostly fiction; so both some familiar (to the former) classics and many less widely known works were included. Almost all of them are set in England (including one by an American, Edith Wharton's really outstanding "Mr. Jones"), though Oliver Onions' "The Cigarette Case" is set in Provence. (That one is a very different type of story than his better-known "The Beckoning Fair One," but in its different way, equally effective.) Quality writing, however, was a must for inclusion. While the editors had a preference for malevolent ghosts, not all the stories feature these, and the endings may be happy or tragic (or may feature a grim kind of poetic justice, where vengeful spirits are involved). Where lethal effects are involved, they tend to be from fear or suicide; grisly gore and violence isn't characteristic of this tradition. ("The Victim" has a gory part, but there it's the description of a human murderer disposing of his victim's body that's grisly.) Ghostly manifestations in these stories range from an unnatural inability of candles to stay lit in a particular room to much more overt phenomena.

Sir Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber" is the first selection here (the arrangement is chronological, except for T. H. White's story, which was written in the 1930s but is arranged by the 1981 date of its posthumous publication), as the first example of the kind of story, in style and substance, that shaped the tradition which followed. (The editors mentioned Daniel Defoe's much earlier "True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal" --which I've read-- in the introduction, but had good reason not to include it: a didactic, unemotional discussion of the afterlife in good Neoclassical style, it's not what the modern reader is typically looking for in this medium, outside of historical interest.) Like many of the other classics here, I'd read this one elsewhere. Other old acquaintances are Francis Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth," Stoker's "The Judge's House" --not a place you'd want to visit, except in a story!-- W. W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," "The Lost Ghost" by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (identified here as Mary E. Wilkins), M. R. James' "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," and Richard Middleton's "On the Brighton Road." Most of these I think I've already commented on or at least mentioned in reviews of the anthologies where I first read them.

My reading here was strictly of tales I hadn't already read. Some of these were by authors I've read before (though sometimes not much of) and others I was encountering for the first time, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (whose "The Roll-Call of the Reef" was excellent!). To comment closely on most of the stories would require spoilers, since the effect of many of them depends heavily on the surprise of the denouement. Most of them were at least good and enjoyable, and some especially stood out as polished gems, great stories of their type; others in the latter group include Le Fanu's "Squire Toby's Will," "The Empty House" by Algernon Blackwood (who's a writer I usually think is overrated, but this is one of his better works, an outstanding study of fear), E. Nesbit's "Man-Size in Marble," A. N. L. Munby's "An Encounter in the Mist," E. F. Benson's "The Confession of Charles Linkworth;" Walter De La Mare's "Bad Company;" L. P. Hartley's "A Visitor From Down Under;" A. M. Burrage's "Smee;" H. Russell Wakefield's "Old Man's Beard." and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "The Shadow in the Corner." Elizabeth Bowen's "Hand in Glove" (which has certain affinities to Henry James' "A Romance of Certain Old Clothes," one of his better works) and Simon Raven's "The Bottle of 1912" were also eminently satisfying --though each in a very different way! E. G. Swain's "Bone to His Bone" and Arthur Gray's "The True History of Anthony Ffryar" show the felicitous influence of M. R. James, with their references to old books and records and antiquarian flavor.

The casual use of the n-word for blacks at one point by a character in Thomas Burke's "The Hollow Man" (1935), a story where the animation of the revenant is due to African tribal magic, is irritating; but as in the works of Twain and Faulkner, it realistically represents the actual speech of the time and place, and that story is one of the most original in the book. Others that are particularly original are May Sinclair's "The Victim" and A. E. Coppard's "Ahoy, Sailor Boy!" (both of which use unorthodox theological premises, but which are nevertheless well-written and manage to make some good points).

IMO, not all of the selections are clearly identifiable as a ghost story as such; Maugham's "The Taipan," set in China, seems to be more a tale about a grim precognition, and the uncanny events of William Fryer Harvey's "The Clock" aren't explained as caused by a ghost (nor explained at all, which is the source of the effect here). But they're both good stories nonetheless!

Robert Aickman's "The Cicerones" didn't work for me; it effectively built an atmosphere of unexplained menace and creepiness, but here the lack of explanation made it to hard for me to suspend disbelief or find any real meaning or satisfaction in the story. IMO, "Ringing the Changes" would have been a better choice for a story to represent this author. The other three stories I didn't get into were all by writers new to me. I was disappointed with Charles Williams' "Et in Sempiternum Pereant;" knowing of his status as an Inkling, I expected much from it, but the premise did not, for me, achieve a suspension of disbelief, and the extreme "interiority" of the style I found reminiscent of Henry James at his worst. (Not being able to read Latin, I got nothing out of the title or the concluding lines in Latin; Williams would no doubt say, with some justification, that this only reflects a lamentable gap in my education, but it's a gap shared by a lot of modern readers, who no longer have the classical background writers of his generation could presuppose.) "A Wicked Voice" by Vernon Lee (whose real name was Violet Paget), a tale of one composer haunted by the malevolent ghost of another, is technically well-crafted; but the intense focus on music and the narrator's musical likes and dislikes lost a lot for me, as a tone deaf person. Readers who aren't tone deaf might well like it, if they can tolerate Lee's fulsome, verbose style here; the latter isn't usually a problem for me, but even I found this one a bit heavy sledding. And I personally didn't care for V. S. Pritchett's "A Story of Don Juan."

After setting this book aside as finished, I realized I never did read the Henry James selection, "The Friends of the Friends." That's a consequence of reading stories in an anthology out of order! However, it's not a terrible consequence; my past experience with James' work leads me suspect that I may not have missed much, and I feel that I did certainly read enough of the book to review and rate it, and to classify it as "read." And virtually all the tales here are well worthwhile for ghost story fans! ...more

28 likes · Like · see review

Group Home Bookshelf Discussions

Photos Videos

Send invite Members Polls