Kay Pankey

This is a collection of ten nineteenth-century short stories on supernatural themes by more or less well-known British writers, published as a follow-up to a similar collection of American stories. Setting the cut-off date at 1900 excludes a lot of the most famous writers of ghost stories, since M R James, H P Lovecraft, and the rest mainly came to prominence in the first decade of the 20th century. Arthur Machen didn't make the cut either, even though some of his best-known stories are from show more the 90s: maybe the copyright owners were uncooperative. Another problem Pankey acknowledges in her introduction is that there wasn't the same magazine short-story tradition in pre-1900 Britain that there was in the US, so a lot of writers are excluded simply because their stories would have been too long for the format.

So what do we get? The big stars are Dickens's famous story "The Signal-Man" and Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost", both of which still stand up well, even when you've read them many times before. Another piece in the same subversively comic spirit as the Wilde story, but less familiar, is Conan Doyle's "The Great Keinplatz Experiment". Unfortunately this clashes awkwardly with H G Wells's "The story of the late Mr Elvesham", a slightly clumsy attempt at a serious version of the same kind of identity-switching plot.

Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale" (an interpolated story from the novel Redgauntlet) is a great piece of 17th century Border atmosphere, properly chilling in all the best ways. Wilkie Collins's "A terribly strange bed" and RLS's "Markheim" were interesting too, although both obviously owe a lot to Poe.

"The trial for murder" by Wilkie's brother Charles Allston Collins (Dickens's son-in-law), which opens the book, falls rather flat, even after editorial tweaking by Dickens. He seems to have been better as a painter than a writer. Bulwer-Lytton's "The haunters and the haunted" and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green tea" are both very rambling and Victorian, with the actual story buried in a welter of pseudo-scholarly speculation by the narrators. Bulwer-Lytton at least has a story: in Le Fanu's case the narrative can be reduced to "clergyman sees ghostly monkey".

Moderately entertaining, but other collections of out-of-copyright short stories are available. show less