Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

Fall is the traditional time for ghost stories, and readers will find a wealth of unnatural shades and haunted places in this far-ranging anthology of 29 reprints and Stephen Graham Jones’s grim original “Uncle.” Richard Bowes’s “There’s a Hole in the City” finds ghosts from New York City’s past treading the streets after 9/11. “A Soul in a Bottle” by Tim Powers is a tangled love story of a tricksy spirit looking to take advantage of the living, while John Shirley’s “Faces in Walls” reverses that premise with bloody results. Tale-tellers are as haunting as the stories they relate in Neil Gaiman’s “October in the Chair” and Barbara Roden’s “The Palace.” Spirits are bent on gruesome revenge in Sarah Monette’s “The Watcher in the Corners” and Nisi Shawl’s “Cruel Sistah.” The afterlife is nothing like you’d expect in “Ancestor Money” by Maureen F. McHugh and “Cell Call” by Marc Laidlaw. Guran delivers a diverse and solidly entertaining variety of spooks and chills. (Sept.)