86 books like Collected Ghost Stories

Helen Macdonald, Richard Hines and I first met on a foggy winter’s day in Oxford back in 2009, and quickly formed an unofficial T. H. White Goshawk fan club. We were all incubating books of different kinds, with the common element of T. H. White’s book The Goshawk. We continued to share thoughts and information as our books took shape.

Helen’s book describes how she sought solace in a goshawk following the shattering loss of her father. She compares notes on her hawk training experience with White.

The lines between her and the hawk become blurred. In many passages the prose is vivid. "The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent." "She looks new... a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass."

I couldn't resist recommending one of my favorite novels.

The period following the French Revolution has often been described in terms of the birth of the modern nation-state and the globalization of the domination of nature, but Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, despite being a work of fiction, does a better job than many works of history in undermining these myths and portraying popular attitudes toward fairies and magic in the early 19th century.

When many people think of fairies, they imagine Tinker Bell and little winged creatures, but cutesy fairies were a Victorian invention, and Clarke preserves the ambiguities of early fairy lore. Magic, too, was understood by many of its practitioners as a practical craft, similar to how Clarke depicts it.

All that is to say, this novel explores fascinating themes and is also a cracking good read.

Out of all of the books I have read, I have read A Christmas Carol more times than any other. An instant phenomenon when it was first published in 1843, it has never been out of print. It is the embodiment of not just a Christmas ghost story, but of a story that encapsulates the very essence of the spirit of Christmas in the popular imagination in a way that no other story ever has. Although I had always loved watching the 1951 classic film Scrooge with the wonderful Alastar Sim in the title role, I didn’t read the book until I was in my teens, when I came across a lovely copy of a 1950 edition in a charity shop. Since then, I have read, and shed a tear over, A Christmas Carol every Christmas – I won't embarrass myself by revealing exactly how many times that is, but… show more.

This anthology of dark fairy tales is everything I love in fiction.

As Carter once said herself, she liked to pour new wine into old bottles, giving them a shake and then seeing them explode. This is something I also do in my own writing - taking the themes of myths or fairy tales and weaving their darkness into my Victorian gothic novels. 

Although it’s a vampire classic, a surprising number of people don’t know about Carmilla. It’s a little older than Dracula and its sapphic themes are as they are.

What’s fun about it though, is the setting and small number of characters. Personally, I had no idea what schloss was, but it’s a castle, in this case a lonely one. Poor sheltered Laura describes her life, and the few people she knows, in careful detail, before it’s all turned upside down by their pretty new guest.

“I wanted to be alone in my room and glad over it all to myself.” In the framing story, two Victorian gents struggle to decipher the hidden meanings of a teenage girl’s diary they have recently uncovered. Partially written in a secret language, that could equally derive from folklore sayings or teen slang, the contents appear to hint at an inauguration into pagan rituals and witchcraft in the nearby woods. A unique attempt to conjure a dark magic out of the missing memories of childhood, this novella explores both the excitement and peril of keeping your first secrets. “I was afraid something had happened to me…”

This list would not be complete if I did not include one of Lovecraft’s books, as he is a true icon of the macabre, having created his own pantheon of Gods. He inspired Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and Stephen King to name a few. His stories are unique, entrenching, groundbreaking, and stay embedded within you long after you’ve read them. Horror fans know him well, but to most people who aren’t familiar with his name, they actually inadvertently know about his work. John Carpenter’s The Thing is based on Lovecraft’s In the Mountains of Madness. The character Pennywise from It is based on Lovecraft’s ideas of “outer gods” and evil beings that exist in dimensions outside of normal human experience. 

The Lurker at the Threshold remains my favorite story because it encompasses everything Lovecraft wrote about – unspeakable revelations, fractured characters, and boundaries of space and time. To me,… show more.

This passionate paranormal romance between a talented soprano singer and a macabre musical genius blends mythical aspects of a legendary ghost haunting the Paris Opera House. I was enthralled by the supernatural forces and deliciously dark seduction of Christine Daaé by the unlikely Romantic hero, the Phantom. I enjoyed how the chivalrous Raoul, le Vicomte de Chagny, nobly battles the diabolical Phantom like a medieval knight defending his Lady. I read this classic in its original French language version while obtaining my MA in French literature, and I loved both the English translation as well as the modern musical film adaptation.

Oh, I cried my eyes out over this book when I was a kid! It’s a tale of Arthurian Britain, but somehow it reads, more than any other I’ve seen, like a historical novel – less T.H. White than Rosemary Sutcliffe. Bradshaw grounds it deeply in Welsh rather than French culture, and the magic feels eerily normal – terrifying, but also just part of the weave of the world. Add to this characters you get truly attached to, and it’s bewitching in the best sense; the book lingers in my imagination like a place I once lived when I was a child – and imaginatively, that’s what it is. 

This anthology holds a special place in my heart. I received a copy of it as a Christmas present from my dear grandmother in 1979. Just holding it in my hands brings back so many happy memories of that long-departed lady. The book contains just eleven stories, but it is “a collection of deliciously scary fare.” Among the choice delicacies contained within its covers is the shortened version of A Christmas Carol made by Dickens for his public readings of the story, which I read in his imagined voice. Alongside anthology favourites by Hugh Walpole, Algenon Blackwood, and Jerome K. Jerome are less familiar, but equally rewarding ghostly tales by Marjorie Bowen, Oliver Onions, Margery Allingham, and others. I don’t know if it is still in print, but anyone who takes the trouble to find a copy will be richly rewarded.