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This anthology of 31 stories will be a delight for those who like their fiction in those blurry lines of in-between reality, where an everyday occurrence can suddenly turn spooky. Or, as editor Marjorie Sandor writes in an introduction, these are stories that take place "in a recognizable world, in which something, or someone, begins to go unfamiliar."
The stories are varied in time and theme, presented chronologically from 1817 to the present. The authors range from the well-known and perhaps expected - Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates - to newer authors, such as Chris Adrian, Aimee Bender, Dean Paschal, and Karin Tidbeck.
The book opens with a strong story, "The Sand-man," by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, who died in 1822 and was an accomplished writer of hallucinatory tales. The protagonist in his story, a young man easily swayed, falls in love with the beautiful Olimpia. All his friends can clearly see that there is something not quite right with her, but Nathanael continues in his pursuit, which eventually becomes his downfall.
Obsession is one of the themes running throughout the anthology. In Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed," a woman becomes obsessed with trying to find out what's in the letters that her husband keeps receiving - letters that leave him "emptied of life and courage." And in "The Music of Erich Zann," by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, a man's strange fascination with the music that comes from the top floor of his apartment building propels him into a sinister world.
Many stories take the ordinary or mundane - a train ride, a walk home after work, one's home or neighborhood - and make them disquieting events. A man gets stuck in a railroad station overnight on a snowy night in "The Waiting Room," a ghost story by Robert Aickman. An elderly couple become increasingly irritated by neighbors on the other side of the woods whom they can hear, but not see, in "The Jesters," by Joyce Carol Oates.
But one of my favorites may be an outright ghost tale, "Phantoms" by Steven Millhauser. Here, the unexpected and scary - ghosts - are quite ordinary. An entire town sees phantoms all the time. Each of the town's residents reacts differently when confronted with a phantom, with emotions running from fear to love. In any case, Millhauser's narrator makes us feel forlorn for not seeing ghosts. Who knows, maybe this Halloween I'll get lucky.
§ Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, October 2015
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