Great Ghost Stories - Hardcover

Grade 7 Up Great Ghost Stories is a collection of horror stories, mostly serious, but with a sprinkling of humorous stories for comic relief. Many of them are by classic authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Bram Stoker, Saki, Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, Washington Irving, Ambrose Bierce and Lord Dunsany. Since many of these stories are available in collections of these authors' works, and since there is no apparent common element other than the broad theme of horror, it serves no obvious purpose to have them collected in an anthology. The vocabulary is too advanced for students below junior high level to appreciate, but today's young adults, used to the likes of Stephen King, will no doubt find these stories disappointingly mild. Indeed most of them are not sufficiently horrific to inspire terror. The most successful of them, Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," is encountered so frequently that it scarcely needs repeating. The sketchy black-and-white illustrations are generally unimaginative. They add nothing to the book's visual appeal and, if anything, somewhat diminish the potential for horror. Ruth Reutter, Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, Ohio
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Geiger's drawings increase the hackle-raising effects created by the tales in Schwartz's collection. For instance, the reader is a witness to the "wise precautions" taken by Poe's narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart." There are 15 entries in the anthology, all except one worthy of the adjective great, as promised in the title. Strangely enough, the disappointment is by Woody Allen, whose genius seldom fails him. The premise, and most of the telling, in his "Count Dracula" is fast and funny: The vampire thinks night has fallen during an eclipse of the sun and he goes looking for victims, only to be undone when the sun shines again. The ending, however, lacks the famous Allen clout. Saki, Mark Twain, Dickens, Lafcadio Hearn, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, Washington Irving, Gahan Wilson, Robert Arthur, A. M. Burrage and Al Sarrantonio are the other notable contributors.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.