The Dark: New Ghost Stories Paperback - 2004

Modern audiences have long inured themselves to fear, trained themselves to shut off their childish nighttime terrors and scoff in the face of deliberate scares. But award winning anthologist Ellen Datlow--called the genre's sharpest assembler of strange, dark fictions by William Gibson, author of Neuromancer--was convinced that there was life in the ghost story yet. So she challenged a list of varied and talented contributors to scare the heck out of her.

The resultant collection singlehandedly redefines the ghost story, going far beyond the accustomed tropes and gore of horror stories to consider the only realm that still truly scares us: the unknown. The Dark takes a nuanced and disquieting look at the tormented and unquiet dead; the darkness in us, the living; and the sometimes tenuous boundary between the two.

Under the covers of The Dark, you will find a gathering of sixteen original, unique ghost stories, deftly penned by authors versed in the argot of the damned, including Ramsey Campbell, Jeffrey Ford, Glen Hirshberg, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Sharyn McCrumb, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, and Gahan Wilson. No two stories are alike; all are calculated to make it hard to be alone with the lights out. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.