Aidan & Nancy Chambers - Ghosts I & 2

[dem bones]

Aidan & Nancy Chambers - Ghosts (MacMillan: Topliner , 1969, 1970, 1978)

Blurb:

The Haunted and the Haunters - the terrifying story of a night in a house which its owner refuse to enter ...
Housebound - a blood-chilling tale of diabolical possession ....
Room 18 - where a man sees Something in a mirror ....
Footsteps Invisible - an embodiment of barbaric evil tracks a doomed man across the world ...

Theses are only a few of the tales of terror in GHOSTS. A book definitely not to be taken at bedtime

Edward Bulwer Lytton - The Haunted And The Haunters
R. Chetwynd Hayes - Housebound
Malcolm Blacklin - Room 18
Robert Arthur - Footsteps Invisible
Anon - The Restless Dead (Blackwoods, 1892)
Rudyard Kipling - The Mark Of The Beast
Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart
Oscar Wilde - The Canterville Ghost


Aidan Chambers - Ghosts 2 (MacMillan: Topliner, 1972, 1974)

Seeing Is Believing - as Pamela Lockwood learned to her horror.
We'll Always Have Tommy - or so Len and his wife thought, till Tommy had them.
Last Respects - when a man visits his dead relation. Or was he dead after all?
The House Of The Skull - a place once peaceful, but peaceful no more. The skull saw to that and grinned.
Dead Trouble - for a ghost out haunting. Not funny for him, poor spook, but side-splitting for everybody else.

Aidan Chambers - Last Respects
Aidan Chambers - Seeing Is Believing
Aidan Chambers - Nancy Tucker's Ghost
Aidan Chambers - Dead Trouble
Aidan Chambers - The House Of The Skull
Brian Morse - We'll Always Have Tommy
Aidan Chambers - The Ghost, The Girl And The Gold
Aidan Chambers - Murder Will Out
Brian Morse - The Haunted Honeymoon


Two more collections for young adults, the first being an intelligent mix of the new and old, the second relying too heavily on the one author but still worth having for the Morse pair.

[Calenture]

You mean these books were aimed at younger readers? I mean, of course I realised that really... naturally. Oh darn.

[lynnielynn]

Ooohh, you should read Anthony Horowitz - Horowitz Horrors, my 8 yr old brought it back from the school library, I thought they were rather quite good stories

[dem bones]

Aidan Chambers - More Ghost Stories (Kingfisher, 2004)

Tim Stevens

August Derleth - The Lonesome Place
Lance Salway - Such A Sweet Little Girl
Mark Twain - A Ghost story
Robert Arthur - Footsteps Invisible
Jan Mark - The Gnomon
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Haunted and The Haunters (abridged)
John Gordon - If She Bends, She Breaks
Aidan Chambers - Room 18
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Brownie
Agatha Christie - The Lamp
Robert Westall - The Haunting Of Chas McGill
Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart
William Trevor - The Death Of Peggy Morrissey
Catherine Storr - Christmas In The Rectory
Oscar Wilde - The Canterville Ghost


For young adults. Footseps Invisible, Room 18, The Haunted and The Haunters, The Canterville Ghost, Housebound and The Tell-Tale Heart had all appeared in the earlier Ghosts.

Room 18 is credited in Ghosts as by 'Malcolm Blacklin'.

[dem bones]

Aidan Chambers (ed.) - On The Edge (MacMillan, 1990)

Patricia Windsor - Toad In The Hole
Robert Westall - The Trap
Jan Mark - Air Pressure
Margaret Mahy - Local Knowledge
Rex Harley - The Man In the Lift
Vivien Alcock - Eena, Meena
John Gordon - The Steel finger
Brian Morse - The Delicate Sound Of Thunder

Blurb:
They are all on the edge ... of darkness, murder, dangerous speculation and revenge.

if we can overlook the generic cover artwork, this is a tidy enough collection with at least two stand out stories (not read the John Gordon contribution yet, but he's never let me down to date).

Robert Westall - The Trap: A story which begins with a woman butchered to death in her own home and takes innovative torture by lie detector as its theme hardly sounds like the stuff of escapist children's supernatural fiction and The Trap would easily hold it's own in a Black Book Of Horror. Such is the revolting state of Stephanie Harcourt's corpse that an ashen P. C. Jim Connor throws up all over the next door neighbours Persian rug at the thought of what the culprit had subjected her to. The next door neighbour is our narrator, Mrs. Marjorie Fletcher, a widow in her mid-forties who is initially disgusted when, some months later, a sprightly elderly chap named Mr. Megstone moves into Asley Villa. How could anyone be so callous as to buy poor Stephanie's dream home for a song knowing what had taken place there? Mr. Megstone, it transpires, is an antiques dealer and is soon running his business from home. Against all advice, he refuses to install even a token security system and brazenly advertises his expensive wares in the local newspaper. Consequently he becomes a magnet for every housebreaker in Cheshire, but maybe that's the way he wanted it? Mildly supernatural, gloriously nasty.

Brian Morse - The Delicate Sound Of Thunder: not sure i've read a Brian Morse story outside of a Chambers anthology but his We'll Always Have Tommy is by far the best thing about the lacklustre Ghosts 2 and this is pretty damn neat too. 'Ernie', a caller to a late night phone-in, recalls the fateful foggy night he picked up an attractive young hitch-hiker. As they drove on, the weather conditions worsened, forcing him to pull up on the outskirts of Caxby, a remote village in the West Midlands. His passenger, fearing he was about to molest her, made a dash for it. The last he saw of her, she'd been intercepted by armed soldiers and frogmarched toward a village of "lizard people".

"A likely story", thinks the DJ, who believes Ernie's call is tantamount to a confession that he raped and murdered missing Pink Floyd fan, Elizabeth Turner. But Elizabeth is alive (after a fashion), listening in to to the show and regretful that Ernie has unwittingly signed his own death warrant. Some years earlier, a Government endorsed experiment in germ warfare was tested on the unsuspecting Caxby community with spectacularly hideous results, and the ground is still contaminated. The matter was been hushed up for years and any leaks ruthlessly suppressed

[dem bones]

Aidan & Nancy Chambers (eds.) - Ghosts (M Books, 1990; originally 1969)

illustration: Francis Phillipps (the same 'W. Francis Phillips' responsible for several classic early Pan Horror cover paintings?)

Blurb:
This is a collection of some of the best and most memorably haunting ghost stories ever written. The Haunted and the Haunters is a terrifying tale of a night in a house which its owner refuses to enter. Housebound is a blood-chilling tale of diabolical possession. In Room 18 a man encounters something deadly. The Footsteps Invisible are an embodiment of barbaric evil that track a doomed man across the world.

Anon - The Restless Dead: (Blackwood's, Dec. 1892). "But what a man! He had been dead for years; on his bones the flesh had shrunk and dried, and in some parts rotted off; it was a man, yet not a man, a skeleton, yet not a skeleton, a horrid corpse endowed with life, or at least with the semblance of life." Alas, poor Mr. George Woodfall, rich, benevolent pillar of the community. How came this finest of Sydney's gentlemen to simply vanish off the face of the earth? Narrator Rowley and his companion, the Rev. Charles Power, learn the answer as they holiday in the mountains of the Great Dividing Range. A ghastly apparition guides them to the cave beneath a waterfall where Woodfall murdered the three gold prospectors he'd fallen in with.

Robert Arthur - Footsteps Invisible: Times Square. Blind newspaper vendor Jorman has a highly developed sense of hearing and can identify people by their footsteps. One rainy night he gets talking to the English archaeologist Sir Andrew Carraden, a man with a guilty secret from his time in Egypt excavating the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Tothet. The ghastly guardian has pursued him relentlessly across the globe and he’s seen what it can do to a guard dog ….

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Housebound: The ghost of bank-robber Charlie Wheatland was killed in a siege at the Coopers' new house. Celia, fifty and fed up, develops the power to draw his ghost out of the woodwork. At first he appears as a black, vaguely human shape, but gradually Wheatland manifests in all his former glory and asks what she requires of him. Celia decides she wants him to murder Harold, her boring, selfish other half. "No, I cannot kill, only free your husband from his body. Order me to free your husband from his body." Celia does, but what will become of Harold's vacant shell?

[dem bones]

Aidan Chambers - Ghosts 2 (MacMillan: Topliner, 1972, 1974)

Aidan Chambers - Last Respects
Aidan Chambers - Seeing Is Believing
Aidan Chambers - Nancy Tucker's Ghost
Aidan Chambers - Dead Trouble
Aidan Chambers - The House Of The Skull
Brian Morse - We'll Always Have Tommy
Aidan Chambers - The Ghost, The Girl And The Gold
Aidan Chambers - Murder Will Out
Brian Morse - The Haunted Honeymoon


Blurb:
Seeing Is Believing - as Pamela Lockwood learned to her horror.
We'll Always Have Tommy - or so Len and his wife thought, till Tommy had them.
Last Respects - when a man visits his dead relation. Or was he dead after all?
The House Of The Skull - a place once peaceful, but peaceful no more. The skull saw to that and grinned.
Dead Trouble - for a ghost out haunting. Not funny for him, poor spook, but side-splitting for everybody else.

Revisiting Ghosts 2 for first time in about a century. Aiden Chambers' several contributions are a grab-bag of original fiction, 'true' ghost stories and folklore. However, it's his co-contributor who impresses.

Brian Morse - The Haunted Honeymoon: A nightmarish first 48 hours of married life for Alice and Len when they drive out to her late Grandmother's secluded cottage in the Cotswolds. Alice was born illegitimate - her mother died three days later - and Granny, who despised the child for her mother's "sin," shut her away from the outside world. Dead she may be, but Gran has no intention of letting Alice bed down with a disgusting man! Much Poltergeist activity. Commendably downbeat for a "children's book" of the time, as is:

Brian Morse - We'll Always Have Tommy: After his death in a collision with a lorry caused by his father's drink driving, Tommy's ghost returns home to comfort his mother - or so she likes to think. In truth, he wishes her out of the way. Dad was always his favourite. Tommy is a bit of a rotter.

Aidan Chambers - Last Respects: Mr. John Howard Clayton, very upset that nobody has come to view him in the chapel of rest at Middleton's Funeral parlour, pays a visit in person - or rather, his ghost does. Narrated by the undertaker's fifteen year old son.