The Phantom Coach: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Ghost Stories

by Michael Sims

Overview

Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Draculas Guest (vampires) and The Dead Witness (detectives) have been widely praised, has gathered twelve of the best stories about humanitys oldest supernatural obsession. The Phantom Coach includes tales by a surprising, often legendary cast, from Charles Dickens and Margaret Oliphant to Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as well as lost gems by forgotten masters such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and W.F. Harvey. Amelia Edwards chilling story gives the collection its title, while Ambrose Bierce (The Moonlit Road??), Elizabeth Gaskell, (The Old Nurses Story??) and W. W. Jacobs (The Monkeys Paw??) will turn you white as a sheet. With a skillful introduction to the genre and notes on each story by Michael Sims, The Phantom Coach is a spectacular collection of ghostly Victorian thrills.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620403242
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/26/2014
Series:	The Connoisseur's Collections
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	784 KB

About the Author

Michael Sims is the author of acclaimed nonfiction books The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, The Story of Charlottes Web, Apollos Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, and Adams Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of Human Form. His anthologies include The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Draculas Guest: A Connoisseurs Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories, and The Dead Witness: A Connoisseurs Collection of Victorian Detective Stories. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and son.
Michael Sims is the author of four nonfiction books: Darwins Orchestra, Adams Navel, Apollos Fire, and a companion book to the National Geographic Channel series In the Womb: Animals. His three previous literary collections include The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, and Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief. His writing has appeared in many periodicals in the U.S. and abroad, including New Statesman, Washington Post, Orion, American Archaeology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. He speaks often at colleges and other institutions and has appeared on many TV and radio programs, from CBSs Early Show and Inside Edition to a BBC Radio series about the human body. His Web site is www.michaelsimsbooks.com. 

Editorial Reviews

06/02/2014
The mournful, moralizing, and malevolent dead lurk in the gaslit streets, ancestral estates, and tortured psyches of this solid but unremarkable reprint anthology, which will appeal more to newcomers than to “connoisseurs.” Selections explore the genre’s varied stylistic approaches and major themes, including women’s rights, social injustice, and psychological realism. A spirit punishes familial abuse in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story.” Spectral children haunt Rudyard Kipling’s bittersweet “They.” Amelia B. Edwards’s “The Phantom Coach” is a gritty, evocative tale of spectral reoccurrence, and Henry James’s “Sir Edmund Orme” elegantly renders psychological reaction to the otherworld. Cosmic terror reverberates from a forbidden text in Robert W. Chambers’s “The Yellow Sign,” and death knocks at home in W.W. Jacobs’s morally gripping “The Monkeys Paw.” Abstract notions of revolution and repression are given ghostly form, inviting historical introspection as well as literary enjoyment. Sims’s survey of the unquiet Victorian dead is a decent introduction to the period. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

A collection of delighfully creepy ghost stories that were once popular in Victorian periodicals...a great for literature fans who enjoy lesser-known stories by famous novelists.” —Booklist

“A f0ine follow-up to Sims's acclaimed Dracula's Guest and a necessary addition for lovers of all things Victorian, especially of the creepy variety.” —Library Journal

“Just in time for All Hallow's Eve, Sims has released The Phantom Coach, a collection of classic Victorian ghost stories published by Bloomsbury in a softcover edition. The book includes creepy tales from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Ambrose Bierce, among others.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Combined into one volume, these 12 stories give readers and excellent entry point into the spooky litrature of the Victorian era—a time marked by a fascination with death and dyring.” —Shelf Awareness

“Barzun considered the ghost story 'more artful—and more productive of shivers—than the straight tale of horror,' an assertion that is abundantly substantiated by Michael Sims's delightful anthology of Victorian ghost stories.” —Washington Post Book World

“A little advice: hold on to your seat; phantom coach or not, it's going to be a bumpy, spine-tingling, thoroughly enjoyable ride.” —Chapter 16

“Michael Sims has compiled a book sure to send a shiver down the spine of even the most skeptical reader . . . Sims's eloquent introduction provides the perfect backdrop for the stories that follow, describing the rise of periodical literature, which favored short fiction, and the influence of the most famous writer of his day.” —The Knoxville News Sentinel

“Sims, editor of this brilliant collection, gathers stories of the undead written during what he loosely terms the Victorian era . . . the bloodsuckers presented here are predators who can be turned away only by Christian symbols, garlic, and little else. Do not expect sparkling Twilight vampires or even the good-guy types that sometimes appeared in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise. An excellent addition to popular fiction and literature collections.” —Library Journal, starred review, on Dracula's Guest

“Dracula's Guest invokes the dangerous shadows of Victorian culture, those dark places where passion, terror, pathos, and sorrow mingle and merge. Gathering together canonical works along with less familiar knock-out masterpieces, Michael Sims has produced an anthology designed to keep us all up at night.” —Maria Tatar, professor and chair of the program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, author of The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales and Enchanted Hunters, on Dracula's Guest

From the Publisher