Gentle Ghosts

By Mario Guslandi

Phantoms at the Phil is a cute, small book of 92 pages collecting three stories commissioned for a Christmas ghost-story event that took place at a private Library in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2004. A delightful non-fictional introductory piece by Ramsey Campbell sets the tone by reporting his experience with domestic, friendly ghosts dwelling in his own house.

The first story, "The Custodian" by Sean O�Brien, features a fastidious scholar who, day in, day out, attends the local library to peruse volumes in order to complete a totally insignificant literary essay. A ghostly apparition and a haunted book will trap him forever in a much more demanding task. Written in an elegant prose, partly reminiscent of the classical Victorian ghost stories, partly of Kafka�s atmospheres, the tale is quite enjoyable, in spite of its rather strained final section.

"The Dusk Jacket" by Gail-Nina Anderson is a rather puzzling piece of fiction, involving an ailing landlord, an absent-minded tenant, a neglected rose garden and an odd booklet. Told in a delicate narrative style, it remains somehow unaccomplished and the spectre showing up in the last two pages seems a bit out of context. But it may well be that I haven�t fully grasped the meaning of this flimsy, obscure yarn.

Finally, in Chaz Brenchley�s "Another Chart of the Silences", the narrative ingredients are constituted by the cruel, haunted rocks on the sea coast luring ships and sailors to disaster and death, a friendship between a sailor and a teenager, and a cellular phone catching messages from Beyond. A modern, original ghost story, nicely blending elements from the past and the present.

Packaged with a CD recording the actual readings of the three stories during the literary meeting, the book can provide good entertainment and a few pleasant shivers to any genre fan.