Echoes

June 1, 2019

In this spine-tingling anthology, readers meet a girl who bargains for her sister's life in Seanan McGuire's "Must Be This Tall To Ride." Justice for a murdered woman comes from beyond the grave in "About the O'Dells" by Pat Cadigan. Four artists work the supernatural into their mediums and unlock a door that should have stayed closed in "The Ghost Sequences" by A.C. Wise. Bracken MacLeod depicts the lengths an old woman will go to not to be alone in "The Loneliness of Not Being Haunted." This collection includes these and other ghost stories by best-selling authors, such as Richard Kadrey and Nathan Ballingrud, as well as original stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Tremblay, and Alice Hoffman. VERDICT Captivating and utterly creepy, this is a book to curl up with by the fire on a stormy night--just hope that the lights don't go out.--Elisabeth Clark, West Florida P.L., Pensacola

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
Datlow, widely considered among the best anthology editors in the business, has compiled another stellar collection of tales, most previously unpublished and commissioned for this work. The diverse contents, featuring work by well-respected horror and literary authors, such as Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Seanan McGuire, and Alice Hoffman, as well as critically acclaimed up-and-comers, such as Bracken MacLeod, Indrapramit Das, Alison Littlewood, and Vincent J. Masterson, show a respect for the rich and long tradition of ghost storytelling that does not simply rehash old tales. Instead, these twenty-first-century ghost stories are as complicated and varied as our times. Tales that terrorize sit next to stories that creep; slow-burn atmospheric pieces can be found beside tales that are in-your-face from the very first sentence. This volume impressively presents today's horror through its most visceral and universal trope, thought-provoking tales about death and beyond. Fans of ghost stories from throughout history will haunt your library looking for a copy, especially those who like their modern iterations found in novels like Slade House by David Mitchell (2015) and novellas like The Grownup (2015) by Gillian Flynn and Mapping the Interior (2017) by Stephen Graham Jones.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)