Ellen Datlow is one of horror's quintessential, bestselling, and most acclaimed editors. She has won multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, and Shirley Jackson awards, and has received lifetime achievement awards from several organizations including the World Fantasy and World Horror Associations.She was the fiction editor of OMNI for nearly twenty years, and edited the magazines Event Horizon and Sci Fiction, and is currently a genre fiction editor at Tor.com. Her many anthologies include the long-running Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, the Best Horror of the Year series; Snow White, Blood Red; Lovecraft's Monsters; Naked City; The Monstrous; and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror.

Hauntings edited by Ellen Datlow

This spine-tingling anthology—complied by the horror genre's most acclaimed editor—collects a chilling array of ghost stories from the past twenty-five years. Our obsession with the mysteries of the afterlife is explored in these supernatural tales of haunted houses, lost souls, unexplained phenomena, and "good" neighbors. A star studded list of contributors includes Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, Connie Willis, and many more.

In these terrifying tales you will find:

A sweetly vengeful voice on the radio who calls a young soldier out to join a phantom patrol

A hotel maid who threw her newborn child from a fourth-story window lingers in an interminable state

An intern in a paranormal research facility who delves deeply into the unexplained deaths of two staff members

A serial killer plans his ultimate artistic achievement: the unveiling of an extremely special instrument in a very private concert

At once strangely familiar and totally shocking, these unexpected and terrifying stories will haunt you long after you put down your book and turn out the light.

CURATOR'S NOTE

We couldn't possibly do a StoryBundle about ghosts and apparitions without including an anthology edited by the highly acclaimed Ellen Datlow, and Hauntings has everything you could possibly desire on the theme, with stories by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, George R.R. Martin, Elizabeth Hand, Peter Straub and more, and a "creep" level that ranges from subtle to deep. – Tricia Reeks

 

REVIEWS

  • "This anthology of 24 previously published dark fantasy and horror stories, edited by the ever-adept Datlow (Blood and Other Cravings), explores a variety of situations in which people encounter literal or figurative specters from beyond. Some feature the ghosts of lovers or spouses wronged, while others give readers a powerful lens through which to view the evil people can do here on Earth, as in the gut-wrenching 'Cargo' by E. Michael Lewis. The theme is interpreted quite loosely and in varied ways, although many of the stories—such as the atmospheric opener, Pat Cadigan's 'Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie,' and Adam L. G. Nevill's tense 'Where Angels Come In'—hinge on anxieties relating to children in peril. Even so, the collection flows smoothly, capturing the pleasantly shivery dread of a round of ghost stories told by a fire, with only a few hiccups or sour notes (the most sour being Richard Bowes's deeply unpleasant "Transfigured Night"). Solid entries by Neil Gaiman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Joyce Carol Oates capture the mood perfectly and will thrill fans of the eerie."

    – Publishers Weekly

  • "I have a short list of editors that I will buy an anthology of, regardless of whether or not I have even heard of the writers it contains, and Ellen Datlow is at the top of that list. She has this crazy knack of consistently putting together stellar anthologies and Hauntings is no different."

    – Horror Talk

  • "That delicious sense of tantalization, of maybe and what if, impelled me through page after page, encountering intriguing characters, spine-shivering settings, and bits and pieces (sometimes literally…of corpses)."

    – Hellnotes

  • "Datlow once again proves herself as a master editor. Her mission to broaden readers' concepts of what a haunting can be is nothing short of a success, and the twenty-four stories on display run the gamut from explicitly terrifying to eerily familiar. Readers who wish to be haunted themselves should not miss this one. Highly recommended."

    – Arkham Digest
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Introduction by Ellen Datlow

Death and dying haunts us. We are obsessed with the question of what happens after death, whether we can leave a part of ourselves in this world, the only one we know well. This obsession is manifested in the popularity of ghosts and hauntings in fiction over the centuries from Homer, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Edith Wharton, through Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman, and up to contemporary writers such as Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, David Morrell, Kelly Link, and the twenty other contributors to this volume. Despite the barrenness of death, the genre of the ghost story is fertile with possibility, blooming with life.

Ghosts are not like the other revenants that haunt our imaginations. Unlike zombies, vampires, and werewolves, the ghost can almost never be fought physically. They seek the society of the living, but not to consume us, like vampires and zombies, or to walk among us unsuspected, like werewolves, but to communicate with us, to bring the past into the present. Ghosts are persistent memories, refusing to let us forget the people and things that we had thought gone, the people and things whose loss had grieved us, and especially the people and things whose loss had brought us relief.

Ghosts haunt, and so do we—how many of us have "old haunts" we can remember with nostalgia and perhaps also a bit of distress? And of course that is because ghosts are us. Becoming a vampire, a zombie, a werewolf, these are all fates that are inflicted from something outside us, outside our own lives. But ghosts stay with us because of something in their own lives—a need for familiar comforts, a desire for revenge, a powerful love. The emotions that drive us also create ghosts.

While the desire for revenge is one of the most persistent motives for a haunting, it is perhaps love that is the most poignant, for the very notion of ghosts is one way of expressing the fantasy that those we love are not really dead, that we can still communicate with and care for them just as we did when they were alive, and that they can still care for us, as well. Ghosts in this anthology are parents hoping to protect their children, are witnesses or perpetrators of terrible events hoping to make up for their misdeeds.

As I put together this anthology, I noticed again and again how so many of the stories involve children. These come in several varieties: a memory of a childhood experience of trauma, a story of a dangerous or cruel child, or a story in which a terrible fate befalls a child. Why might this be? There are several possibilities. First of all, children are deeply vulnerable, and so often experience an intensity of emotion—particularly fear—that greater experience of life dulls. I have never experienced any terror as an adult that can compare to how I felt about entering the pitch-black room I shared with my already-sleeping sister. Dark is harmless...but dark was terrifying. Second, we in the first world live in a fortunate age our ancestors could scarcely dream of, one in which a parent can usually be sure that all of his or her children will live to grow up. Childhood mortality has metamorphosed from an ever-present fear to an almost unimaginable obscenity, and what is horror but the bringing to life the unimaginable? Finally we come to the dangerous child, the evil child, in this volume, the ghost child who has the power to reach across the division between living and dead and threaten those she or he has left behind. Perhaps this child is the manifestation of the creeping adult knowledge that given how helpless children so often are in this world, and how much cruelty is so often inflicted on them, the powerful child really is someone we should fear.

Hauntings reprints some of the most disturbing and chilling tales of ghosts and other hauntings published between 1983 and 2012. This is by no means a definitive survey of recent ghostly tales, but a sampling of different types of hauntings, and as I do with every theme I address, I've chosen stories that will broaden our understanding of what a haunting can be.