Undiscovered Scotland

 

"Tales for Twilight: Two Hundred Years of Scottish Ghost Stories" selected and introduced by Alistair W.J. Kerr is a wonderful read for anyone who enjoys feeling the hairs rise on the back of their neck.

The publishers summarise the book well: "Tales for Twilight offers a spine-tingling selection of unnerving tales by writers from James Hogg in the early eighteenth century to James Robertson, very much alive in the twenty-first. Scottish authors have proved to be exceptionally good at writing ghost stories. Perhaps it’s because of the tradition of oral storytelling that has stretched over centuries, including poems and ballads with supernatural themes. The golden age was during the Victorian and Edwardian period, but the ghost story has continued to evolve and remains popular to this day."

As well as being an excellent collection of enjoyable ghost stories, the book serves as a rather fine sampler of the work of some of the very best authors Scotland has produced in the past two centuries and includes stories from James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott, George Mackay Brown, Muriel Spark, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy Boothby, Algernon Blackwood, Eileen Bigland, Ronald Duncan, James Robertson and Ian Rankin.

There are fifteen stories in all, including two whose authors are unknown. The book as reviewed was an extremely nicely-produced hardback that begins with an introduction by Alistair W.J. Kerr that sets the scene; and ends with biographical notes on the authors.