Weekend Book of Ghosts and Horror 2. [antikvár]

The accent DEATH is not journey's end, but only a dark beginning. That is the message of every ghost story. Horror stories are almost always about life — and what happens to the living. In the midst of death we are in life. In the midst oflife we are in death. The tales of the quick and the dead gathered together in this fourth collection of ghosts and horrors penetrate into some very strange, out-of-the-way, and perhaps best left alone corners. They pierce the dark places of the human mind. And that is a territory that can be more terrifying than any midnight churchyard or bone-clattering charnel-house. What, for instance, are we to make of those two dreadful Victorian bogy-women whose unhappy histories are recounted here: the tigerish Kate Webster, who slaughtered her employer and then reduced that unfortunate lady to "a rag, a bone, a hank of hair", and a gallipot or two of rich, creamy dripping: the oily, mewling Mrs. Amelia Dyer, shedding her pure gin tears over the watery graves of the little dears - tiny, pathetic, one-parent babies-whose futures were, literally, circumscribed by the 'special' tape with which she throttled them down on the (baby) farm. Or what will you of the two loving sisters - les soeurs Papin - maidservants, who in a fine surrealist frenzy plucked the eyes from their mistress' head, and, having slain her and her daughter, left a solitary eyeball upon the staircase as sentinel or marker of the event. In their prison cell the peasant sisters were visited by appalling convulsions, and there is record of the astonishing leapings of the elder sister - said to be the wicked influence - and how she "jumped like a frightful automaton to an incredible height against the prison wall". And what kind of devilry was it bestrode the Highlands of Scotland 100 years ago, that an old laird's worn-out corpse should be kidnapped from its coffin, snatched like a death's head hostage, hijacked from the granite fastness of the family vault? It is the mentalities of these dreadful perpetrators that frighten