There are two reasons this book appealed to me, when I spied it on a charity shop shelf. It’s part of Wordsworth Editions’ ‘Tales of the Mystery & Supernatural’ series, which brings us lesser-known spooky tales from the past. It also has a skeleton on the cover, hunched over in a dejected manner. He looks like he was waiting too long for a bus, which has finally arrived after a century!

These stories are all disturbing in some way and have a vaguely early 20th century setting. I’m not sure they’re brilliant enough to be considered classics, but they were worth a read. All the male characters were annoying in their attitudes towards women, but perhaps this is a commentary on the time from a female author (Dorothy Kathleen Broster, 1877 – 1950). The spookiness of the stories was varied; we have ghosts, obsessions, time-travel and murder. Often they are in European continental settings. I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the story ‘Couching at the Door’, as it has a corruption theme. An older debauched man haunted by a fur boa attempts to transfer the haunting to a young innocent man, the illustrator for his book. The other stand-out story in the collection is ‘A Taste of Pomegranates’, where two sisters become trapped in a cave while looking for prehistoric paintings. I felt that the stories often ended in a disappointing way and could have made a more frightening impression on the reader.

Published by Wordsworth, 2007.