Famous Modern Ghost Stories

Description

Famous Modern Ghost Stories is a very special book by Dorothy Scarborough. Known as the writer whose name was linked to the history of Texas and as an expert in folk tales and ghost stories, Scarborough created this anthology to offer the public classic horror stories written by the greatest masters of the genre including Edgar Allen Poe, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Algernon Blackwood, W. F. Harvey, Anatole France, Ambrose Bierce and other reputable authors of horror and ghost stories.

The anthology contains 15 short stories, all of them featuring supernatural elements, but not all of them ghost stories proper – Scarborough seemed to have interpreted the term ghost loosely and she included into her collection several stories that belong more to the genre of speculative fiction than to any other genre category. Some of the stories, such as The Willows by Algernon Blackwood or The Messenger by Robert W. Chambers, are truly horrifying, with bizarre elements, buried skulls and terrible visions, while others, such as Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev or The Woman at Seven Brothers by Wilbur Daniel Steele, are included into collection to provide insight into life’s gloomier aspects, but not in a scary way.

There is no reason why ghost stories cannot be funny, so Scarborough included several humorous pieces in her collection, too – The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce is hilarious, while At the Gate by Myla Jo Closser is a very entertaining, silly story about dead dogs going to heaven.

Fans of the genre probably know that no collection of ghost stories can ever be even remotely complete without at least one piece by Edgar Allen Poe, and this anthology includes one of the master’s best stories, Ligeia, horrifying the reader in the most poetic way possible.


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