Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories edited and illustrated by Audrey Niffenegger – review

The grief of Kipling, the humour of Wodehouse and the shock of Gaiman: a handsome collection to leave us deliciously chilled

Early one evening Rudyard Kipling found himself in the presence of ghosts. Walking aimlessly beside a railway track just outside Khartoum, he “loafed back in the twi-light escorted by a small boy and an entire brigade of ghosts”. In his Letters of Travel he recounts, quite placidly, that he’d never met a single one of that ghostly crew before, yet knew them “most intimately”. They were not a threat, nor even particularly surprising – rather, they gave the lonely old man consolation as he awaited the night train: “They said it was the evenings that used to depress them the most, too.”

“They” is the title of perhaps the finest ghost story in this fine collection, edited and illustrated by the novelist Audrey Niffenegger and spanning more than 170 years from an 1843 Poe classic to a story published in the New Yorker in 2014. Written by Kipling in 1904, “They” is remarkable for its depth of feeling, and its benevolent ghosts drawn out of the ether by yearning and grief. Kipling’s daughter Josephine had died when hardly more than an infant, her illness brought on by a difficult passage across the Atlantic to join her father. The loss changed him profoundly, and in this story – narrated, as ghost stories so often are, by a version of the author himself – his loving grief finds perfect expression.

Continue reading...