Dread and Delight: A Century of Children's Ghost Stories Hardcover - 1995

From the rear cover

This is a collection of 40 ghost stories written for children over the course of the present century. Compiled by the award-winning novelist Philippa Pearce, author of the classic children's book Tom's Midnight Garden, these stories will captivate adults and children alike. As a genre, children's ghost writing is a relative newcomer to the literary field. While children's literature has flourished for over 200 years, supernatural fiction for the young has come into its own only in the twentieth century. Dread and Delight charts its development, from its roots in the writing of authors such as M. R. James, A. C. Benson, and Walter de la Mare, to renowned present-day authors including Jan Mark, Leon Garfield and Penelope Lively. There are two previously unpublished stories by Lucy Boston and Robert Westall, and a full introduction and lively notes on the authors. Drawn from all over the English-speaking world, including America, India, and the Caribbean as well as Great Britain, these stories treat the supernatural with humour and wit, as well as with a proper respect. They all succeed brilliantly in creating an atmosphere of suspense, unease, or the pleasurable tingle of anticipation that children relish as much as adults. As Philippa Pearce writes in her introduction, 'fear becomes awe and wonder... the delight is in the dread.'.