Ghosts (1981) is the earliest Marvin Kaye horror anthology I own. Kaye edited a series of these for the Science Fiction Book Club, they were regularly used in promotions as the free gift — that’s how I got my first one! They probably did this less because of the anthologies themselves and more because of the gorgeous Edward Gorey dust jackets. Not gonna lie, I am 90% posting about them because of the dust jackets.

As anthologies, I have mixed feelings. They’re massive. This one is 650 pages. If you have a stack of them, you might feel like you have a pretty good working body of American and European horror from the 19th century to the date of publication, and you’d basically be correct. I have a hard time with them, though — I’ve only used them as reference a handful of times and I often wonder why Kaye selected the stories he selected rather than, I dunno, the better ones by the same author. They remind me an awful lot of the Norton anthologies I had for my literature survey classes in college — massive tomes full of “classic” stories so dusty I couldn’t bear to read them. And I honestly think the heft of the book contributes a lot to this feeling. I wish Kaye had picked 250 pages of bangers. And there are 250 pages of bangers in here — Leiber, Crawford, Wakefield, Gaskell, Benson, Jean Ray and Nigel Kneale, among others. Did we need Henry James, Wilkie Collins and Madame Blavatsky, though? How is there not a single M.R. James story in here?

Anyway, that cover. Gorey makes such good choices. I love the gray watercolor background, the yellow glow, the hanged man as the focal point, but facing away from us, and one of Gorey’s trademark swooning women flying above the hand-lettered title. Atypically bright for Gorey, too, but that makes it strangely spectral, I think!