Dancing On Air

Jacket art is by Paul Lowe

Ghosts and hauntings can take many forms, and spring from many sources; and while the conventional view of ghostly presences is that they are unwelcome visitants haunting unwilling victims, they are, on occasion, not only welcomed but embraced by people whose lives seem to cry out for something which is in short supply in the more ordinary world of mundane encounters.

The ten stories collected in Dancing on Air were written over a period of four decades, and while not all of them include ghosts, all of them concern hauntings. Some of these hauntings may or may not be projections springing from the obsessions of those being haunted; but they are no less real, or no less capable of doing good or ill, for all that. Does the much-loved childhood treasure in 'The Black Mare Midnight' exist? Do the seemingly innocent entries in 'The Visitors' Book' conceal something much more sinister? Who—or what—is the occupant of 'Cyprian's Room'? Does a group of children really manage to conjure up Something in 'The Monster Drawing'? And is there any truth behind the ghostly legend told in 'Dancing on Air'; or is it merely a tale designed to entertain tourists?

In Dancing on Air things are seldom what they seem; and all are the more terrifying for it.

CONTENTS: 

• Introduction
• The Visitors' Book
• Cyprian's Room
• The Black Mare Midnight
• Prester John
• The Monster Drawing
• A Walk in the Forest
• The Man in the Blue Mercedes
• The Dinosaurs
• The Married Man
• Dancing on Air
• Sources

FRANCES OLIVER was born in Vienna and brought up, educated, and married in the United States. Subsequently she lived in a number of countries with her husband, who wrote travel books and shared her passion for mountains and mountaineering. After her husband's death, she and her daughter moved to Cornwall. She has published three non-supernatural novels—All Souls and The Peacock's Eye, set in Austria, and The Tourist Season, set in Turkey—and two 'occult' novels: Xargos, also set in Turkey, and Children of Epiphany, set in Greece (and now reprinted in the Ash-Tree Press Classic Macabre paperback series). Besides writing, she devotes much time to environmental and animal welfare campaigns, and is a local group co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth. She also loves reading and writing ghost stories. Her work has appeared in All Hallows and Ash-Tree's anthology Shadows and Silence.

Limited to 500 copies