Book Review: "Spectral Sounds" ed. by Manon Burz-Labrande

Full Title = Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of the Acoustic Weird edited by Manon Burz-Labrande

British Library Tales of the Weird is an excellent anthology of stories to read in the winter months. Often filled with creepy and sometimes obscure stories on a theme, these books are collections of short fiction that is both famed for its spooky writing or, has often been lost to time. This particular anthology is called Spectral Sounds in which we have ghosts communicating with the real world through audio. From footsteps up the stairs on a quiet night to rousing and sudden noises, this anthology has a great amount of tales that won't make you want to sit at home in silence as that is where things go 'bump' in the night. Including stories by Algernon Blackwood and Sheridan Le Fanu, I think this is possibly one of the better compilations of scary stories by the British Library.

The opening story entitled The Invisible Tenants of Rushmere by Florence Marryat was something that really got me hooked into the anthology properly. Living in a newly bought and quiet house, a London doctor is on the verge of having a panic attack as everyone around him keeps suggesting that there are sounds coming from the hourse such as footsteps going up and down the stairs. The story moves along with the landlady suggesting that nobody ever lives in that house alone and yet, the doctor - nervous and tense, refuses to listen to such things. A perfectly crafted haunted house narrative, it is one of the classics of the Victorian Ghost Story trend that draws the reader in.

Another story I quite enjoyed in this was the one by Algernon Blackwood entitled A Case of Eavesdropping. About a narrator who rents a home in a remote mountain range in order to focus on his writing, the quiet and isolation that once made it a fantastic spot make it seem eerie and unpleasant very quickly. One night the narrator is unintentionally eavesdropping on two people having a conversation outside his rented property. The conversation topic is an otherwordly malevolent entity of the supernatural that has become aware of the presence of the narrator themselves. Shaken and disturbed, the narrator begins to experience a strange and terrifying force in his surroundings as things take a turn for the worst in Algernon Blackwood's classic style. Using sound, the narrator cannot see the entity, but always knows it is there.

The book is split up into different sections that deal with sound and each has its own personality. As they deal with the horrific natures of sound and what they can do whilst driving us insane, these stories are more than often those of hauntings or otherwordly supernatural unseen entities and honestly, the repeated trope does not bother me - that is the kind of thing I enjoy. The classic ghost story is always fascinating and yet, we very rarely get a complete focus on sound. This anthology has really brought out the most atypical narratives of the genre.

Other stories I enjoyed included the following: The Day of My Death by Elizabeth Stuary Phelps, The Whispering Wall by H.D Everett, The Spirit's Whisper by [unknown], The Lady Maid's Bell by Edith Wharton, Over the Wires by H.D Everett and Siope: A Fable by Edgar Allan Poe. The only story I did not enjoy too much was The House of Sounds by M.P Shiel mainly because it was quite difficult to get into even though it had a lot of great atmosphere - the prose was too oddly penned for me.

All in all, I thought that this book was a great example of what a British Library Crime Classic should be. A mixture between stories we have seen before and stories we have never seen blended with the authors we have and have not heard of. It creates a good amount of expectation with stories by Algernon Blackwood but then again, with these ones that are founds in say, a periodical or some that are more obscure, it adds them to the modern repetoire of classic ghost story - allowing a whole generation of horror readers to discover and rediscover them.