"Houses, lovers, children, cats"--Audrey Niffenegger (Raven Girl) has collected 16 stories that feature hauntings of familiar domestic relationships and objects. She has chosen them because she likes them, "and what I like about them is their intimacy, their off-kilter matter-of-factness and their vivid evocations of order disrupted, sudden awful knowledge, the human condition as cosmic joke."
Ghostly's stories span 170 years, most of them first published before 1950. Not all will be to everyone's taste, but there is something here for anyone by a selection of brilliant writers. Several stories, such as Neil Gaiman's "Click-Clack the Rattlebag" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," are true horror stories. Others, including P.G. Wodehouse's "Honeysuckle Cottage" and Saki's "Laura" and "The Open Window," are pure comedy. There are stories by Edith Wharton, M.R. James, Kelly Link, Ray Bradbury, one by Niffenegger ("Secret Life, with Cats") and a new one by Amy Giacalone.
Niffenegger introduces the book and each story with a full-page original black-and-white illustration and a short preface. The ghosts of the title don't always appear to the expected person, and sometimes they appear through a letter on a table, or the sound of a comb through invisible hair. They attract the living away from life, though not always intentionally. The living sometimes respond with terror, sometimes with longing and love, and in a few cases with healthy practicality, though more often they do what perhaps they shouldn't: open that door, walk toward that sound, say hello to the intriguing stranger. --Sara Catterall