Shapes that Haunt the Dusk.

At dusk the familiar loses its edges, and shapes appear that daylight would deny. This collection takes its evocative title from that threshold hour and gathers stories where the natural world gives way to the strange.

What it's about

This is an anthology of short fiction with a supernatural or uncanny cast, bringing together tales in which the ordinary and the otherworldly meet. Collections of this period drew on ghosts, visions, premonitions and inexplicable events, favouring atmosphere and suggestion over open horror. The pleasures lie in mood and the slow prickle of unease as each story lets something unaccountable slip into an everyday scene.

Themes

The porous boundary between the living and the dead, the reach of memory and grief, and the mind's encounters with what it cannot explain run through the tales. There is a characteristic restraint here, a preference for the half-glimpsed and the ambiguous over the plainly monstrous.

Why it still matters

The supernatural short story is one of the enduring pleasures of American literature, and anthologies like this preserve the range of the form at its turn-of-the-century height. For readers who love a well-told ghost story, the appeal of these quiet, unsettling tales has not dimmed.

Who it's for

Devotees of ghost stories and weird fiction, readers who prefer their chills atmospheric rather than gory, and anyone who enjoys a collection to be read a story at a time as the light fades.