Richard Dalby (ed) - The Virago Book of Ghost Stories - Virago - 1991
I bought this from a charity shop near my home recently and a key part of my decision to buy it was that it cost a mere 40 pence !
That said, it was 40 pence well spent.
My own personal preference runs to rather old-fashioned ghost stories but there again half the fun of a collection like this lies in trying stories one might never otherwise have come across.
For me the best of the more modern efforts has to be Penelope Lively`s Black Dog.
For the best of the older stories I would turn to Ann Bridge (The Station Road), Margaret Irwin (The Book) and Edith Nesbit (Number 17).
Inevitably there were a couple I was not so keen on, but the only one I really couldn`t get on with was Elinor Mordaunts` The Landlady.
There is an interesting contrast in the approaches taken by different writers. Ann Bridge in The Station Road leaves much unexplained and ambiguous whereas Ruth Rendell in her The Haunting of Shawley Rectory rather overdoes the after-the-event explanations, taking away some of the appeal of an otherwise excellent tale to my mind.
It`s right that at this point I should pay tribute to Scarborough man Richard Dalby who compiled this and many other volumes of a similar nature and who died earlier this year.
I hope that reading this post will encourage others to learn more about this man, the many anthologies he compiled and his deep love of supernatural fiction of all types.
This blog will be returning to Richard Dalby at a later date, hopefully fairly soon.
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