Six Ghost Stories

This collection of weird tales, all steeped in the classic ghost story tradition, will enthrall readers who best know Summers (1880–1948) as an early-20th-century compiler of occult lore (The Vampire: His Kith and Kin) and weird fiction (The Supernatural Omnibus). According to the preface by the author, Summers believed ghosts should be “grisly evil things of terror and dread and doom,” and so they are in “The House Agent” and “The Man on the Stairs,” both set in houses haunted by murders that occurred on their premises. “A Toy Theatre” and “Romeo and Juliet” feature ghostly stage re-enactments of deaths in Shakespearean tragedies. “The Grimoire” is, by contrast, almost comic in its account of a reader of a book of summoning spells who doesn’t realize that the strange servant who materializes is not the new valet. Summers’s prose drips with the plummy ripeness of a Victorian penny dreadful, and this book, originally scheduled for a 1938 publication that never occurred, is an entertaining aperçu to his literary legacy. (Oct.)