The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Today’s countdown to Halloween reading suggestion: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Wharton was an American novelist who wrote in the tradition of English ghost stories (one of the reasons why she is often found in anthologies of classic ghost stories). If my previous recommendation was all modern blood and gore in (mostly) modern settings, this one is all about subtlety: the ghosts are but shadows and faint presence at the corner of the eye. It can be nevertheless very scary in an eerie way. Many of the stories being set during autumn, they are all the more fitting for an Halloween read. But the relevance does not stop there: you will find All Souls (which I recommended back in 2016), a story that is actually set on Halloween, although the day is not named. It’s about a witch gathering which we do not see, but which deprives a wealthy woman of her staff and leaves her alone in her secluded house. It might be purely coincidental, but I think you can find echoes of Wharton‘s All Souls in modern stories such as The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining. But they are all worth reading.