Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades

"Ghost Stories" is, perhaps, the least remembered of the many pulp magazines which flourished during the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet the magazine managed to survive for more than five years, and during its lifetime published stories by such authors as Cynthia Asquith, E.F. Benson, A.M. Burrage, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Dreiser, Robert E. Howard, and Carl Jacobi. The magazine was the brainchild of flamboyant editor Bernarr Macfadden, who, although not himself a great fan of ghost stories, was aware of the public's fascination with ghosts and the supernatural. "Ghost Stories" became therefore, a magazine which offered a mixture: reprints of classic tales, 'true' ghost stories supposedly related by those who had experienced them, and new supernatural fiction, ranging from the gentle to the horrific. For "Phantom Perfumes", editor Mike Ashley has selected seventeen of the very best tales to appear in "Ghost Stories" between 1926 and 1931. From the classic pulp excesses of 'The Affair of the Clutching Hand' and 'The Creature that Rose from the Sea' to the gripping 'The Soul with Two Bodies' and the haunting 'Seven Grey Wolves', these stories vividly recapture another era, and bring the flavour of "Ghost Stories" to a new audience. Ashley also provides a checklist of the issues of the magazine, and a complete index to the contributors, while veteran writer Hugh B. Cave - the only contributor to "Ghost Stories" still writing today - discusses the magazine in a special foreword.


Genre: Horror