Marble knights walking in the night, a man coming back from the dead, a man who acquires a sweetheart in the graveyard, a haunted picture frame, killer vines, such are the fodder of E. Nesbit’s collection of 18 ghost stories. None of these stories are truly terrifying, but some of them are at least original.
There are a few that turn out not to really be ghost stories—for example, a salesman who uses a ghost story to get a better room—and I liked those better than most of the ones involving the supernatural, although I do like a nice, chilling story.
Several of the stories are about thwarted love affairs or unscrupulous rivals for a girl’s affections. Some have sad endings, but in others people get what they deserve.
This book is about on par with the volume of Victorian ghost stories I reviewed a few years ago, but uniformly better written and sometimes more subtle.
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Sounds like an interesting selection. As I mentioned before, I’ve read and enjoyed a few of her stories in various anthologies and they’re always well written. To be honest I don’t find very many horror stories really scary, but they’re good at letting us see some of the concerns of the time, especially the ones written by women.
Yes, I agree about not finding the stories that scary.