Favourite ghost story writers and stories?

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

This is Rosemary Timperley's first proper collection called From Another World.
http://www.sundialpress.co.uk/ROSEMARY%20TIMPERLEY.html

Sundial does a lot of ghost authors, so worth a look around.

[teguififthzeal]

I'd forgotten about De La Mare entirely.

Lafcadio Hearn has to make any list. I've also been enjoying Wilkie Collins collection "Tales of Terror and the Supernatural".

Walter de la Mare is one of the finest mystery writers of all time, provided you don't care for anything so formulaic and expected as answers to the mysteries. His ghostly output is small compared to other titans, but Seaton's Aunt, All Hallows, Crewe, Out of the Deep, A Recluse, Strangers and Pilgrims, Winter, Mr. Kempe, The Tree, Miss Duveen and A: B: O are stories I revisit incessantly.

I have been listening to the BBC radio Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare series again today. For some bizarre reason they included The Almond Tree, which is a great story but seems really out of place as a selection because it isn't a ghost story or a tale of supernatural dread. I honestly think they intended on including The Tree and there was a mishearing in a meeting. Still, it is a great story and among my favourite of de la Mare's non-genre short stories along with the glorious Missing.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Joshi is editing a complete Metcalfe collection. It's from Centipede, so probably very expensive.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I really enjoyed Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story". Has so much standard tropes but done quite satisfyingly.

Going through some favourite stories from the classic canon of people most commonly considered ghost story writers and sticking to the ones fitting the far more traditional definition than the one I'd normally use:

Robert Aickman's The Inner Room
Walter de la Mare's All Hallows
Oliver Onions' The Beckoning Fair One
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House
Elizabeth Jane Howard's Perfect Love
Sheridan Le Fanu's Shalcken the Painter
Vernon Lee's Amour Dure
E. F. Benson's The Room in the Tower
M. R. James' A Warning to the Curious
Henry James' The Turn of the Screw
Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover
H. G. Wells' The Red Room
Amelia B. Edwards' The Phantom Coach
Richard Middleton's The Ghost Ship
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher
Ramsey Campbell's The Guy
Algernon Blackwood's The Listener
H. R. Wakefield's Lucky's Grove
John Metcalfe's Mortmain
L. P. Hartley's A Visitor from Down Under
A. M. Burrage's Smee
Robert Hichens' How Love Came to Professor Guildea
E. Nesbit's Man-Size in Marble
Charles Dickens' The Signal-Man
Reggie Oliver's Death Mask

[Nemonymous]

There seems to be something transcending about this A.C. Benson work, a story unread by me till today. Something I was not at all expecting!

THE CLOSED WINDOW by A.C. BENSON - my review: THE CLOSED WINDOW by A.C. Benson | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

[miguel1984]

It is not horror or a ghost story, but the 2017 film A Ghost Story is pretty good.

[Nemonymous]

POOR GIRL by Elizabeth Taylor
At first simply a pen portrait of a lonely Governess, separate from the other servants’ comraderie in the house. But this ineluctably becomes — almost without our or even the author’s volition to to control it — a truly great ghost story. It is as if the author herself is bewitched. Or is it a ghost story at all? Is it sleep-walking, is it suggestion, omosis, a little 7 year old boy’s telepathy with the man he will become, as he bewitches — by flirtation and leaning against her as she checks his sums with the stain of red ink or rouge, or simple evil desires that smell like a scent — his Governess, Florence Chasty, or she unknowingly bewitches him? His mother as involuntary stooge to such shenanigans by thinking she senses them happening? The boy who has within himself the man he will become, a philanderer like his father, or is it his father who enters Florence’s room for canoodling, or is she already a ghost of someone else, i.e. possessed by a woman with green beads as necklace that break and are spilt on the floor of this story? Florence who naively thinks of her childhood home. Yes, a truly great story. The scent of evil infuses every word, innocence, too. Remarkable!

[Nemonymous]

THE SLYPE HOUSE by A.C. Benson

“…the silence of emptiness, but such silence as may be heard when unseen things are crowding quietly to a closed door, expecting it to be opened, and as it were holding each other back.”

…and that in the context evoked a huge frisson, if a frisson can indeed be huge. We learn of Anthony’s dark backstory, his reputation in the community, his making of mechanical toys, including ‘a puppet that moved its arms and laughed’, his oriel casement in Slype House overlooking the local church with a vantage point upon what the priest handles on the altar, and of Anthony’s own secret locked room with a different altar, where, one night, in a dark mood, using instruments of ritual, he tries to summon his beloved mother, with descriptions implying perhaps he was a bit of what some people may call a mummy’s boy, I guess, but instead he is sent on a narrow journey where two forces fight over him. He recovers back in his bed in Slype with what the doctor deems to have been a stroke, but whether a stroke of luck or otherwise, I felt as uncertain as Anthony also seems to feel by a sense of whatever did still “dwell by him” at the end, as he “awaited his end.” That casement conveying two words of something that felt like a hopeless spyhole, both these words being within ‘Slype House’, I spy.

PS The old Skype?

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My review of ACB’s THE CLOSED WINDOW: THE CLOSED WINDOW by A.C. Benson | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

Further reviews in this mode: Separate horror stories from many years ago | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books