The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark

Anyone who grew up watching The Twilight Zone or remembers some of the spookier episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents will be onto the twist ending of "The Girl I Left Behind Me" within the first few pages. I was disappointed with this opening tale and thought that perhaps ghost stories were simply not Spark's métier. But two pages into the second story, Sir Sullivan Stanley, a distinguished, elderly judge, hears the guilty verdict announced in the capital murder case he is hearing and experiences a spontaneous orgasm. We are in capable hands after all.

Muriel Spark has said of her writing, "I aim to startle and to please." In these eight ghostly tales she does just that. The settings include London during the blitz, a white enclave in Africa, and the Portobello Road. Her ghosts may be mournful or mischievous, and they intrude into the lives of the living in sometimes subtle but always unsettling ways. These polished tales hark back to a time when novelists like Edith Wharton, Henry James, and E. F. Benson turned on occasion and with great effects to the supernatural. Set them aside for a dreary winter day.