posted on 20 Apr 2018

Ghostly: A collection of ghost stories selected and illustrated by Audrey Niffenegger

Anthologies of ghost stories are often formulaic and rather predictable with tales you’ve read a hundred times before. So it’s great to be able to report that this selection by Audrey Niffenegger is quirky and eccentric and packed with unexpected delights.

Niffenegger has taken control of the whole design aesthetic of the book as well as selecting the stories, writing an introduction and providing an illustration for each inclusion. Published in hard cover by Vintage Classics, the book has a sleek and elegant appearance that shows off Niffenegger’s art skills at their strongest and I love the black and white design threaded through with gold and featuring a short-haired cat – an wholly appropriate motif given that cats will feature prominently in the stories themselves.

Perhaps one of the least surprising things in this book is the opening story, 'The Black Cat', by Edgar Allan Poe which is a bit of an old favourite. Having said that, it is a splendidly chilling tale that sits somewhere on the edge of the ghost/horror boundary. But it is followed by Niffenegger’s own contribution which is a considerably more peculiar and unsettling story about cats and their relationship with an elderly helper at a home for strays.

Black cats are just the first in the ghostly parade because not far behind is the spooky child. We get a splendid story, ‘They’, from Kipling in which an early motorists comes upon a remote country house on the edges of a wood infested by the spirits of dead children and A.S.Byatt’s heartbreaking, 'The July Ghost', in which a child killed in a motor accident returns to the garden and house he so loved to find the mother he can never return to. Byatt herself had suffered the tragic death of her own son in a car accident in 1972 and you can feel a tangible exorcising of this particular ghost going on in the writing of this tale.

Then there’s the short but completely unsettling story from Neil Gaiman called ‘Click-Clack the Rattlebag’ which is light on plot and heavy on atmosphere and again at the heart of the story are children and the entirely necessary big, rambling house with attic.

Edith Wharton offers a typically formal story about the influence of the dead reaching into the lives of the living and it’s a narrative that perfectly captures Niffenegger’s main theme – that ghosts are in fact an extension or flirtation with the idea of death.

Having said that, she’s too smart to allow the stories to become little more than maudlin and she sprinkles in a liberal dose of laughs – well, smiles at least. We have a typically rambunctious confection from P.G.Wodehouse, ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’,  in which the spirit of a dead romantic novelist inhabits the body of a writer of detective fiction and a previously unpublished work by Amy Giacalone called ‘Tiny Ghosts’  that sees homeowners with rather naff taste baited by hand-sized trendy ghosts who hate their home decoration choices.

I started this book thinking I’d just read the odd story or two but found myself gradually working my way through the lot and really enjoying the vast range and eclectic taste of the editor. I think this is a wonderfully curated collection and it goes to show just how good anthologies can be if the person putting them together really puts heart and soul into it.

 

Terry Potter

April 2018