The 7th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

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In this, my seventh, collection, I have still contrived to include no author who has appeared in any of the preceding six; to offer no story which does not to one man (this man) seem of significant literary merit; and to purvey only variations on the theme of the truly supernatural, rejecting both the merely scientific, flying saucers and mutating monsters, and the merely shocking, rods and rapes.

In the world around us, needless to say, scientific advance and naked horror are rapidly becoming hard to differentiate. Within these pages is an alternative, a recurrent suggestion that in the universe are forces that may never be understood and mastered (and thus degraded). I believe the great increase in the popularity of ghost stories relates to the increasing demand for ‘a world elsewhere’; because, the way things are going, only if there is such a world can we be in any sense free.

Much winter reading lies behind the process of selection, and much summer winnowing. While the number of good ghost stories is very small indeed, the volume of bad ones, as of bad plays, has to be encountered professionally in order to be credited. Moreover, it is an interesting aspect of the subject that an author often achieves two or three good ghost stories in a lifetime, and is then compelled by business need to submerge them in merely routine collections. I doubt whether this often happens unawares: the really good ghost story is so luminous a product, and so mysterious in its origins, that its author must usually know that this time the depths have spoken. Here, as in other respects, the true ghost story is akin to poetry.

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