Here and Beyond

Six haunting tales of the uncanny, where Edith Wharton strips away the polished social surfaces of Gilded Age America to reveal what lurks beneath. Set in fog-shrouded Brittany, prim New England towns, and the exotic shadows of Morocco, these stories blend gothic atmosphere with Wharton's signature psychological precision. The collection opens with 'Miss Mary Pask,' a deliberate echo of Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' in which a man discovers his supposedly dead love still present, still speaking, in a house of crumbling secrets. Yet Wharton being Wharton, the resolution offers no easy cataclysm only the slow, chilling recognition of how thin the membrane between worlds truly is. Other tales probe the ghosts we carry: not in chains and sheets, but in memory, regret, and the terrible weight of obligations we cannot shed. This is supernatural fiction for readers who find ghost stories more terrifying when they leave questions unanswered.