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3.5 stars

I have been reading this sporadically since Christmas, but Halloween was impetus to push ahead and read the last several stories in a couple of days. And I think the accelerated speed helped me appreciate them more.

Wharton's collection of ghost stories is one part intriguingly psychological, and one part old-fashioned. She seems to foresee this herself, commenting in the introduction that

[taste for ghosts] is being gradually atrophied by these two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema.

The cinema hasn't done away with ghost stories of course, far from it, but it has changed what we expect from them. Wharton's are quiet affairs, ghosts are often absences, or they ring bells or leave footprints, but they resolutely never jump out at you. This took a bit of getting used to... I expected the stories to have twists, as they would now, or to up the ante in some way, but many of them seem content to present the likelihood of a ghost as interest enough to the reader.

And generally, in Wharton's hands, it is. Because she is dealing with the human, regardless of the supernatural trappings. Where there are dark and rambling houses, they are backgrounds to stories of unhappy marriages, or ill-gotten fortunes, or illness or madness. Elsewhere there are slight departures from the ghost story mould -- a rural Gothic piece set among snowed-in farmers, a desert idyll of peaceful horizons and lingering stenches, an old lady left alone who realises that all her mod-cons won't save her from a final solitude.

Excellent writing and pacing. Plots are a bit uneven, but there are some standouts. I really enjoyed "The Pomegranate Seed" and particularly "All Soul's" which I reread, appropriately enough, as Halloween bled into All Souls Day.