Paul's Reviews > The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

A collection of eight ghostly tales from modern writers including Natasha Pulley and Laura Purcell. All bar one have chosen to set their tales in the Victorian era, only one (by Andrew Hurley) is set in the recent past/present. They are easy to read and I read this in a few nights.
I found five of the stories pretty run of the mill, but there were three that for me stood out from the rest. A Study in Black and White by Bridget Collins, The Eel Singers by Natasha Pulley and Confinement by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
Collins sets her tale in an old house with a ridiculously cheap rental (always a sign) and an arrogant protagonist. There is also a chess theme in the background:
“He stared down at the trees, feeling a kind of vertigo that was not quite fear. The unearthly light – the dark shapes against the moon-drenched sky – the clarity of outline, the density of the shadows…He felt the space contract, so that for a sickly second the chess pieces were both huge and small enough to fit in his hand. He shut his eyes, but it made him dizzy and he hastily opened them again. The shadows flickered against the pale glare of the moon, seeming to shift.’’
The Pulley story has characters from her Filigree series, which I don’t know. However it is set in the fens and is suitably eerie and atmospheric with sinister locals, and eels!
The Hargrave story looks at Victorian views about childbirth and examines the nature of post-partum psychosis. It is also based partly on the author’s own experience and on a real life Victorian case. This, for me, was the most telling of the stories.
I’m already having difficulty remembering the others!