Eerie atmospherics, a sense of foreboding, then the unease, a chill, a shudder, ghosts, terror -- again and again, in the twenty-five superbly scary tales of this standout anthology, they're conjured artfully, both by modern masters of the macabre, among them Stephen King, Garry Kilworth, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, and Tony Richards, and by literary greats like Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving, Sir Water Scott, and J Sheridan Le Fanu. Culled from the renowned Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories series, which was edited from 1972 to 1984 by horror fiction writer and erudite anthologist R Chetwynd-Hayes, these highly original, and often long-obscure tales reflect the enduring fascination in our literary tradition with phantoms, specters, ghouls, and wraiths. There's a fetch (i.e., doppelganger) too -- in Tina Rath's nasty take on a violent husband, his shrinking wife, and a scheming woman. And behind Guy de Maupassant's simply titled "An Apparition" lurks a tale that Chetwynd-Hayes places among the top ten most terrifying ghost stories ever written. From Daniel Defoe's engaging period piece, "The Ghost of Dorothy Dingley," set in 1665, to the subtle slice of contemporary ghostly life in Stephen King's "The Reaper's Image," dread takes many fearsome guises in the three centuries of chilling fiction collected here, and solace lies only at the feet of a very dark angel.