Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense

We are currently in the midst of a horror literature renaissance. Names like Joe Hill, Josh Malerman, and Paul Tremblay have reinvigorated the genre with new terrors, endless style, and sharp writing, taking horror to exciting, unexpected, and unsettling places.

But great horror stories are eternal, and those newer works stand on the shoulders of giants, exploring new takes on tropes established more than a century beforehand. Many of those tropes take center stage in Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense.

Featuring some of the earliest and most influential stories in the genre, this book collects a who’s who of horror icons: Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Bierce, James, Wharton, Twain. Each puts their own unique spin on the ghost story, sometimes bringing the horror home with the characters, while other times plunging protagonists into locales both haunting and utterly alien.

And if you’re a fan of Victorian horror, this is your jam. Most of the stories in this collection adhere to classic Victorian stylings, particularly the gimmick of one character telling another character the spooky story, as if you’re getting it secondhand in a gathering amongst friends. It makes the horror both more intimate and more insidious.

Ghost Stories brings to light tales that not only paved the way, but still have plenty of scares left to offer.