A whisper in the night. A dog whose love is greater than death. A doctor who visits a haunted castle to deliver a cordial to a mysterious patient. Here are tales of the uncanny and the supernatural-the creak upstairs, the half-remembered conversation that won't let you sleep, the room full of leaves-that will amuse, delight, and raise the hair on the back of your neck, dear reader. Have you checked the lock upon the door? Turned down the lights? Made sure that there's nothing in the closet or under the bed? Here is a selection of the stories of Joan Aiken, author of the classic children's series The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Contained within, find a horse that isn't quite what it seems, an alley where the Devil is putting on a concert, an unpublished play by Shakespeare, and a battle of wills that begins with a poet falling into an active volcano. As Kelly Link says in her introduction to The People in the Castle, "the particular joys of a Joan Aiken story have always been her capacity for ... brisk invention; her car for dialect; her characters and their idiosyncrasies." If you haven't read Joan Aiken before, you're in for an astonishingly good time. In a second introduction, Lizza Aiken offers an essay about her mother's writing in "The Power of Storytelling: Joan Aiken's Strange Stories." Book jacket.