House of Fear edited by Jonathan Oliver

A friend of mine, David Moore, works at the publisher of this book as an editor and a fine chap he is too. I think I've already established that I don't scare easily so it was with some trepidation that I picked up this collection of ghost stories centred around the idea of haunted houses. It's not that I don't like ghost stories but it takes a writer of some skill to actually tell an interesting story free of cliche and repetition.

I'm pretty pleased that many of the stories in this anthology are solid, well crafted ghost stories with interesting ideas and even some unpredictability. In a field cluttered with lazy writing it's always impressive to find something new. Stand outs amongst the group are Windmill, Trick of the Light and Moretta. As one might expect Christopher Priest's story is the best written but it isn't as good as the three I've picked out. I enjoyed Windmill because it's properly about justice. Trick of the light is a haunting tale about loss and is expertly crafted while being moving and Moretta is the only story with really sensible people in it.

The others are quite varied. Four, possibly five, are pedestrian and a number of the others fall into the obvious traps. Setting a story in a particular time works fine if it's the time that informs the story but using a time to escape having to be original is tedious and the absence of mobiles or modern tech seems to be a bit of a failure of imagination. Additionally, almost all the poorer stories are characterised by characters who refuse to believe what's in front of their own noses, express attitudes completely at odds with other aspects of their characters (and one wonders just how many of the authors consider themselves rationalists as I'm willing to bet I could name each of them just from reading their lead characters) and offer no way out.

You might enjoy characters who have no way out but we're not talking the heights of Greek tragedy here and I found the fact that from the opening line some characters were obviously dead men walking stultifying.

However, on the whole this is pretty enjoyable. A caravan park, a play and even a copse of trees all form enjoyable contexts for a better than average collection of stories.