posted on 04 Jul 2022

Stories of the Night edited by Denys Val Baker

Anthologies of ghost stories are very common and, as you might suspect, very variable in quality. There are those that use stories by one or two big name authors and pack the rest of the book with contributions of questionable quality or those that specialise in presenting ‘obscure’ or ‘never before published’ stories which, in my experience, only demonstrate why they are obscure and have never before seen the light of day. Putting together anthologies that actually work as a coherent collection that ends up being more than the sum of its parts is a major editorial task and a real literary skill that is often underrated.

Stories of the Night published in 1976 and edited by Denys Val Baker is oddly difficult to find and jam packed with contributions from a really high quality and disparate set of authors. Baker, it has to be said, is one of the most respected and high quality anthology editors and it shows not just in his choice of stories but in the way he positions them in the collection. The editor’s introduction makes this sense of coherence explicit:

“As far as possible I have picked stories that differ considerably in style and content, but all have that common link which contributes, I hope to their impact – and all belong, of course, to the dead of night.”

When Baker talks about stories differing considerably in style, he’s not kidding. You’ll find stories here from the likes of Hammond Innes, Dennis Wheatley, John Steinbeck, Vladimir Nabokov, Agatha Christie, H.G. Wells and plenty more from authors with an equally diverse background and approach to writing. And, also unsurprisingly, not all of them will work for everyone – there were several here I just couldn’t tune into but that’s very much about personal taste I suspect.

I’m not personally a great fan of the short story – I always think I should enjoy them more than I do. However, I sometimes turn to an anthology of this kind – especially one focussing on spooky tales – when I need a break between more substantial reads. There are times when you just want to kick back and find a story of six to ten pages that demands little of you and has a satisfying pay-off – maybe even a few chills if you’re lucky. It’s usually a mistake to try reading these collections from cover to cover and I simply never stick with any individual contribution if it hasn’t grabbed my attention within the first couple of pages. So these books are ones to keep by the bed and dip into whenever you want some relaxed reading – and this anthology fits the bill perfectly given its extraordinary range of style and content.

I would personally like to commend Dennis Wheatley’s piece of old-fashioned tosh, ‘The Case of the Thing that Whimpered’, L.P. Hartley’s ‘The Shadow on the Wall’, Agatha Christie’s ‘The Red Signal’ and Ronald Duncan’s ‘Consanguinity’ – all of which I enjoyed greatly.

I don’t plan to tell you the content of any of the stories because that would be a massive spoiler for anyone wanting to read the stories for themselves but what I will say is that these stories are not just spooky or supernatural – the stories of the night are also tales of suspense or revelations about the darker side of human nature.

As I suggested earlier, this collection isn’t easy to find and if you want a copy you’ll almost certainly have to try hunting it down on the second hand book websites where you might have to pay a little more than usual for an anthology.

 

Terry Potter

July 2022