The Intoxicated Ghost, and Other Stories

A woman who sees ghosts walks into a haunted house. Sounds like the setup to a jest, but Arlo Bates plays it completely straight, and that's precisely why these stories enchant. Irene Gaspic has inherited her family's spectral sight, and she wears it with the same weary pragmatism as a woman who perpetually catches her own groceries tumbling from the shelf. When she visits her friend Fanny at the crumbling McHugh estate, she expects the usual ectoplasmic inconveniences. What she finds is a dashing family specter tied to a lost fortune in diamonds, and complications of the fleshly kind in the form of Fanny's brother, Lieutenant Arthur McHugh. The collection drifts through tales of love, society, and the permeable membrane between the living and the imagined, balancing genuine chills with a wry, Edwardian wit. These are ghost stories for readers who find horror exhausting, tales where the supernatural is less a source of terror than a mirror held up to human longing.