The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror

Those who know Edith Nesbit only for her children’s books, most notably The Railway Children, would be surprised to hear that she also wrote many chilling horror stories, collected here in The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, part of the fine Wordsworth Tales of Mystery & Supernatural series. These sturdy, well-crafted stories have a strangely modern feel to them, often with a final paragraph that amps up the chill factor and serves to drops your jaw just a tad more. And there is another notable eerie quality within this collection: Nesbit drizzles in small details that echo across multiple stories... a literary tic that has a strange, unsettling — dare I say, haunting effect.

Surprisingly wonderful. I've always thought "Man Size in Marble" was a great little ghost story, with a surprisingly nasty pay off but I wasn't expecting a similarly despairing and bleak tone to most of the stories. There are a couple of semi-clunkers and oddly Nesbit seems to get a bit more florid the older she gets (and there's nothing I hate more than a florid ghost story), but the best of it - "The Shadow" particularly springs to mind, which has some heart breaking moments in it - is absolutely top notch stuff.

A collection of 20 ghost stories by an author best known for her childrens' books. Some are scary, some are dark, some are just plain weird. Most are about men and what happens to them when they don't act according to some sort of „norm“. As we learn in the introduction Nesbit had to share her husband with another woman and even raised her child. She did so without complaining, but I believe her unhappiness comes through in her ghost stories where she punishes men whether they have done something wrong or not. Today the stories don't seem that scary anymore because similar stories have been written since then, but in her time they must have been quite unique, especially written by a women.
There are stories about zombies, haunted show more houses, ghosts and vampiric vines among many others.
All in all, it's a very good and interesting collection and I like the short story format. It warns you on the cover not to read them before going to bed, and some may haunt you. I read one story every day on the train and it was the perfect book for that. I'd recommend it to everyone who loves a good ghost story although it sometimes shows its age. show less

There's a terrific range of stories in here, from the Gothic to the romantic to the downright terrifying - there's only a couple of the latter, but they're doozies.

Perhaps best know for her Boxcar Children series, E. Nesbit also wrote many entertaining ghost stories. The stories are fairly lightweight, similar to what one would expect from an episode of The Twilight Zone.

My thanks to the good folks at The Literary Darkness reading group for introducing me to this and many other examples of literary dark fiction. There is no other group at Goodreads as capable of picking apart a book and helping readers glean from it all they can.