Book Review: Ghostly, A Collection of Ghost Stories introduced and illustrated by Audrey Niffenegger

Happy Halloween everyone! I wanted to dash out this post to you in time for the big night tomorrow to help you get into a spooky mood. I’m back from my European tour, and this was the last book I finished on my travels. There’s a photo of its final resting place (a hotel that was sure to be haunted, in Kassel Germany), so needless to say, my luggage was quite a bit lighter returning home!

Everyone loves Audrey Niffenegger. If you haven’t read her break-out success The Time Traveller’s Wife, you should because it’s fantastic. And so is this collection! She didn’t edit the stories, but she does introduce each one with a blurb of her own, and she’s also included her own illustrations accompanying each one. Oh, and she wrote one of the stories too (does her overwhelming breadth of talent make me feel a bit useless? Just a bit…).

Ghostly includes more historical ghost stories than newer ones, which was just fine with me, because all the ones chosen were creepy as hell. The newer stories (for example the one written by Niffenegger), seemed almost like science fiction, more ‘twilight zone’ than anything. I’ve included a photo of one of her illustrations here, because I wanted to point out the fact that cats played a big role in this book (!!!). Yes, black cats are creepy, but she took it to a whole new level in her story “Secret Life With Cats”, which essentially describes a crazy cat lady who died in her own house, was eaten by her cats, and then regurgitated by those same cats to come back to life. Yes, I realize this is gross, as well as a huge spoiler alert, but it’s just one story, so you’ve got lots left to enjoy in the book.

If you have time before you head out trick-or-treating, go pick up Ghostly. Or, wait to read it until December when the Christmas cheer is getting too annoying for you, and you’re ready for a good old fashioned scare.