Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades: Memories of Ghost Stories Magazine

Edited, with an Introduction, by Mike Ashley
Jacket art by Linda Dyde.

Ghost Stories is, perhaps, the least remembered of the many pulp magazines which flourished during the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet the magazine managed to survive for more than five years, and during its lifetime published stories by such authors as Cynthia Asquith, E.F. Benson, A.M. Burrage, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Dreiser, Robert E. Howard, and Carl Jacobi. The magazine was the brainchild of flamboyant editor Bernarr Macfadden, who, although not himself a great fan of ghost stories, was aware of the public's fascination with ghosts and the supernatural. Ghost Stories became, therefore, a magazine which offered a mixture: reprints of classic tales, 'true' ghost stories supposedly related by those who had experienced them, and new supernatural fiction, ranging from the gentle to the horrific.

For Phantom Perfumes, editor Mike Ashley has selected seventeen of the very best tales to appear in Ghost Stories between 1926 and 1931. From the classic pulp excesses of 'The Affair of the Clutching Hand' and 'The Creature that Rose from the Sea' to the gripping 'The Soul with Two Bodies' and the haunting 'Seven Grey Wolves', these stories vividly recapture another era, and bring the flavour of Ghost Stories to a new audience. Ashley also provides a checklist of the issues of the magazine, and a complete index to the contributors, while veteran writer Hugh B. Cave—the only contributor to Ghost Stories still writing today—discusses the magazine in a special Foreword. The volume is illustrated with a splendid selection of covers from the magazine.

Contents:

• Foreword: 'Looking Back' (Hugh B. Cave)
• Introduction: 'Spectral Memories' (Mike Ashley)
• 'The Man Who Died Twice' (Frank Belknap Long, Jr.)
• 'The Woman with Two Souls' (J. Paul Suter)
• 'The Dead Who Know No Peace' (Hughes Neupert)
• 'Phantom Perfumes' (Ethel Watts Mumford)
• 'A Soul with Two Bodies' (Urann Thayer)
• 'Seven Grey Wolves' (Stuart Palmer)
• 'The Creature that Rose from the Sea' (Muriel Hunt)
• 'The Angel of the Marne' (Victor Rousseau)
• 'The Thing that Came Home from the War' (H. Thompson Rich)
• 'The Punishment of Barney Muldoon' (Bassett Morgan)
• 'The Spirit in the Garden' (Sophie Wenzell Ellis)
• 'The Room Behind Walls' (W.R. Davis)
• 'The Living Dead Man' (Arthur T. Jolliffe)
• 'Forgotten Harbour' (Gordon Malherbe Hillman)
• 'Chained to a Bed of Roses' (Jack Bechdolt)
• 'The Toad-Man Spectre' (Conrad Richter)
• Checklist of Issues of Ghost Stories
• Index of Contributors to Ghost Stories

Limited to 600 copies