Houses haunted by the skull-bones of a dead man! Vampires! Haunted steamships! Dolls like Chuckie -- but nice! Horror fans will adore F. Marion Crawford's Wandering Ghosts: Crawford had a sensibility and a gift a lot like Peter Straub's (though no one could mistake this book for a collection of Straub's stories -- their talents might be similar, but their subject matter isn't). But, oddly, he isn't remembered, like Stoker and Hodgson and Shelley, as a horror writer, nor, like Robert Louis Stevenson, (who gave the world both Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as a writer of adventure. More like Henry James, we suppose: the man had a reputation, in his day, as a serious writer.

Yuck.

This book, at least, is a horror collection. We know you'll love it.

Francis Marion Crawford (1854 - 1909) was an American writer noted for his many novels, especially those set in Italy and for his classic weird and fantastic stories. H. Russell Wakefield, in an essay on ghost stories, called Crawford's "The Upper Berth" "the very best one" of such stories. Norman Douglas credits Crawford's financial success as instrumental in encouraging himself to write (though he remained critical of Crawford's habit of inserting first-person editorial comments into his fiction).