The Dark: New Ghost Stories - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765304457 ISBN 13: 9780765304452

Publisher: Tor Books, 2004

Synopsis

Modern audiences have long inured themselves to fear, trained themselves to shut off their childish nighttime terrors and scoff in the face of deliberate scares. But award winning anthologist Ellen Datlow--called "the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions" by William Gibson, author of Neuromancer--was convinced that there was life in the ghost story yet. So she challenged a list of varied and talented contributors to scare the heck out of her.

The resultant collection singlehandedly redefines the ghost story, going far beyond the accustomed tropes and gore of horror stories to consider the only realm that still truly scares us: the unknown. The Dark takes a nuanced and disquieting look at the tormented and unquiet dead; the darkness in us, the living; and the sometimes tenuous boundary between the two.

Under the covers of The Dark, you will find a gathering of sixteen original, unique ghost stories, deftly penned by authors versed in the argot of the damned, including Ramsey Campbell, Jeffrey Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, and Gahan Wilson. No two stories are alike; all are calculated to make it hard to be alone with the lights out. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

About this title

From the Author

Adapted from the Introduction:

Ghost stories have been a popular and powerful tradition in fiction for centuries, and have inspired writers of many literary traditions, including such luminaries as William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Kate Chopin, Muriel Spark, and John Masefield.

From the ghost of Hamlet’s father and Banquo’s ghost’s unexpected dinner appearance in Macbeth through disturbing hauntings as in the classic novella, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Faulkner’s "A Rose for Emily," and short stories by M.R. James up to eerie imaginings such as Graham Greene's terrifying, "A Little Place Off the Edgware Road," Robert Aickman’s disturbing short stories, and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, ghost stories have continued to maintain their hold on the literary imagination. Although ghost stories fell out of fashion during the 1980s (with exceptions like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story), with horror moving toward the psychological and more realistic terror tales of serial killers and dysfunctional families, there is no doubt that ghost stories have made a comeback. I think this is because when done well, they are frightening. They're about something we humans cannot avoid—death.

I hope these stories will unnerve you so that when you put down the book you'll spend the rest of the night nervous of the slightest noise, of the creak of a board or the tapping of a twig against a window.

About the Author

Ellen Datlow is a winner of seven World Fantasy Awards, two Hugo Awards for Best Editor, two Bram Stoker Awards, and the International Horror Guild Award. In a career spanning more than twenty-five years, she has been the long-time fiction editor of Omni and more recently the fiction editor of SCIFI.COM. She has edited many successful anthologies, including Blood Is Not Enough, A Whisper of Blood, and, with Terri Windling, Snow White, Blood Red and five other titles in their adult Fairy Tales anthology series; The Green Man and The Faery Reel for young adults; and, for younger readers, A Wolf at the Door and Swan Sister. She also co-edits the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series. Ellen Datlow lives in Manhattan.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0765304457
• ISBN 13: 9780765304452
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Ellen Datlow