Eight authors, eight spooky historic sites...Imagine being given free reign of an historic and possibly haunted location in the English countryside. It's a horror fanatic's dream! It's also the basis for Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories, a collection put together by English Heritage, the organization responsible for preserving and caring for historical sites throughout England. Eight authors were chosen and each given access to a site of their choosing as inspiration for an original short ghost story to be included in the collection.
Here's the full TOC:
"They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek" by Sarah Perry - Audley End
"Mr Lanyard's Last Case" by Andrew Michael Hurley - Carlisle Castle
"The Bunker" by Mark Haddon - York Cold War Bunker
"Foreboding" by Kamila Shamsie - Kenilworth Castle
"Never Departed More" by Stuart Evers - Dover Castle
"The Wall" by Kate Clanchy - Housesteads Roman Fort
"As Strong as Death" by Jeanette Winterson - Pendennis Castle
"Mrs Charbury at Eltham" by Max Porter - Eltham Palace
I thought this was a truly fantastic collection of creepy tales! It's not often that I really love every story in an anthology like this, but in this case I really did.
Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent, and Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, offered up two of my hands down favorites, though. In the first, an art conservator is hired for a job that has terrifying results and in Haddon's tale, people are plagued by memories of another time.
The other tales range from chilling - Max Porter's entry about a woman revisiting the site of her sister's disappearance - to the heart wrenching - Kate Clanchy's tale of a family visit to Housesteads Roman Fort - and everything in between. There's an actress who takes method acting a bit too far in Stuart Evers's tale, a wedding that's crashed by a departed soldier in Jeanette Winterson's delightful tale, a security guard who didn't believe in ghosts before his latest posting in Kamila Shamsie's story, and a lawyer faced with terrifying visions of death in Andrew Michael Hurley's entry.
Trust me, each and every one is fabulous and fabulously eerie!
2 comments:
I checked at my library and they didn't have this. Too bad because I think I'd really like it!
Dianna, it's a UK publication from a press I'm not familiar with, I'm sure it's just not something your library would normally order in unfortunately.
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