3 Review(s)

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during the time of Charles Dickens. He was open-minded, willing to accept, and put to test the existence of spirits. A fascinating and lesser known side of Dickens’s work is his flair for ghost stories. He showed a fascination with ghosts and the macabre and was considered a master of this wonderful genre. Dickens’s natural inclinations towards drama and the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales. Best Ghost Stories contains 14 of Dickens’s most interesting stories, exhibiting the full range of his gothic talents. “The Queer Chair” is a modern fairy story. The ghost, a chair who has human features rather than a spirit of the dead, could easily be some supernatural being. “A Madman’s Manuscript” is a Poe-esque tale about insanity written from the point-of-view of the lunatic. The narrator is known to be unbalanced, but the reader cannot resist the power of his madness to see what happens next. In “The Goblin who Stole a Sexton”, Gabriel Grubb is a mean-hearted gravedigger who drinks and works on Christmas, instead of praying and celebrating, but becomes a changed man after he is captured by group of goblins and taken in their underground cave. The most well-known is Dickens’s ghostly parable “A Christmas Carol”, of the visit to the bitter and tight-fisted miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, by three ghosts, which started the tradition of the ghost story at Christmas. “The Signal-Man”, “The Haunted House” and “The Trial for Murder” are three of Dickens’s quaint but ghostly spoofs. Dickens’s short stories don’t compare with his novels but make nevertheless a highly interesting reading.