Monday, January 31, 2022

GALLERY OF GHOSTS by James Reynolds







Some ghostly deja vu here as the Paperback Library recycles a cover photo originally used by Dell Publishing for Susy Smith's Reincarnation For the Millions. Hey, it's a good pic! And these are good stories, a cut above the tripe peddled by Steiger and Smith in so many of their "strange" collections. All the ghost stories here are true, in as much as they're actual existing legends as opposed to random nonsense made up to fill page counts. Some are especially bloody history, like the sad tale of Inês de Castro, and some are unearthed folklore like the Norwegian Saga of the Seven Spruce Trees, but what they all have in common is a focus on fear that stems from human darkness, rather than rattling chains and similar spectral cliches

Here's a contemporary review by author and poet Dorothy Quick, taken from an archival copy of the New Castle Tribune of NY:

(Click to embiggen)

Paperback Library, 1970 (original pub. 1949)

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