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Edith Wharton put this together shortly before her death, collecting ghost stories that she had written over a number of years. Perhaps ghost stories is a misnomer. Not all feature ghosts in the truest sense. Macabre might be more accurate. Strange things happen, people disappear, and, very occasionally, a ghost is seen. The last story, "A Bottle of Perrier," is not really a ghost story at all, but certainly is disquieting with a shocking end. Wharton's style is the stories chief attraction.

The settings are drawn from Wharton's own experience: country houses of the well to do in New York/New England, England, Brittany. One is set in a townhouse in NYC; another something of an outlier, in an old Crusader castle in an unspecified Middle Eastern location. Many feature people on the edge of society--a private secretary, a lady's maid, an old maid sister--and their travails.

Wharton excels at describing a scene and creating an atmosphere:

"I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before--but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses."
(one of the best description of the feeling of old houses that I have read)

"The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape."
(reminds of waiting for an evening bus in the blizzards of '77 and '78)

Narrative, however, is not Wharton's strength. Some of the longer stories drag a bit (which undermines the suspense). Endings are sometimes lame; "Mr Jones" has good build up, but the end is a model of irresolution. I started to give this four stars, but decided that in the end style can only take you so far.

And Friday the thirteenth is a good day to finish a book of ghost stories.