Front cover of the first American edition of Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories.
'Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (ISBN 9780374251314) is a 1983 anthology of short ghost stories edited by the British author Roald Dahl. None of the stories were written by Dahl himself and all of them had previously been published elsewhere.
The book contains the following fourteen short stories:
- "W.S." by L.P. Hartley (1954)
- "Harry" by Rosemary Timperley (1955)
- "The Corner Shop" by Cynthia Asquith (1951)[1]
- "In the Tube" by E.F. Benson (1923)[2]
- "Christmas Meeting" by Rosemary Timperley (1952)[3]
- "Elias and the Draug" by Jonas Lie (1902)[4]
- "Playmates" by A.M. Burrage (1927)
- "Ringing the Changes" by Robert Aickman (1964)[5]
- "The Telephone" by Mary Treadgold (1955)
- "The Ghost of a Hand" by Sheridan Le Fanu (1851)
- "The Sweeper" by A.M. Burrage, under the pseudonym of "Ex-Private X" (1931)
- "Afterward" by Edith Wharton (1902)
- "On the Brighton Road" by Richard Middleton (1912)
- "The Upper Berth" by F. Marion Crawford (1886)
According to the book's foreword, Dahl began collecting ghost stories in 1958 with a view to having them adapted for a 24-episode American television series. The series was never made after the pilot episode tested poorly with network executives. The fourteen ghost stories included in the anthology are the ones that Dahl considered to be the best of the 749 that he claimed to have read in preparation for the series.
Footnotes[]
- ↑ 1951 is the copyright date given for "The Corner Shop" in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. The story was first published in 1926.
- ↑ "In the Tube" was first published in Hutchinson's Magazine in December 1922 and was republished in the anthology Visible and Invisible in 1923. 1923 is the copyright date given for the tale in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories.
- ↑ 1952 is the copyright date given for "Christmas Meeting" in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. The story was first published in 1951.
- ↑ 1902 is the copyright date given for "Elias and the Draug" in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. A different English translation of the story, originally written in Norwegian, had been published in 1893.
- ↑ 1964 is the copyright date given for "Ringing the Changes" in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. The story was first published in 1955.