For as long as people have told stories, they have been fascinated by ghosts, specters, ghouls, and demons. The human mind is drawn irresistibly to the mysterious -- right down to the deepest recesses of fear. Here, in one value-packed volume are fifty macabre masterpieces from the greatest British and American practitioners of the art of the ghostly tale. Editor Richard Dalby has made an inspired selection that offers readers the very best work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Victorian fireside hair-raisers, Edwardian magazine thrillers, elegant nightmares from the 1920s, and the more manic visions of modern times. Suspense, mystery, and horror specialists such as M. R. James, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Amelia B. Edwards are prominently featured. So are such classic authors as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Mark Twain. Modern writers are ably represented by Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Aickman, and Basil Copper among others. So if you want to curl up with a good book, try The Phantastic Book of Ghost Stories. It just might curl your hair as well. Book jacket.