Echoes - The Ultimate Ghost Story Collection
Words sometimes pop into my head as I read a book I know I’m going to write a review for. I usually write them down along with my thoughts because if I’m thinking of those words as I read a book there’s probably a reason for it. Usually those words are descriptions of the plot of story I’m reading: fast-paced, creepy, atmospheric, dark, gruesome. Some of those words made their way into my notes on Echoes: A Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories edited by Ellen Datlow, but the words that stuck out the most were ones like; classic, epic, perfection.
That isn’t saying the stories appearing within this anthology aren’t scary or engrossing because individually, the stories themselves are great. But when this massive volume of ghost stories is put together, they become the definitive collection of modern ghost stories. You can look high and low and I can guarantee you won’t find a better assemblage of ghost stories in one place. This is the book you’ll pull out every October and find a story or two to read again. This is the book that you recommend to others when they say that want a good ghost story to read. There is a little bit of everything in here, but all of it, each and every story is perfect and fits with the story before it and the one after it to create an impeccable and impressive group of thirty stories that thrill and scare and terrify.
I always list out my favorite stories when I review an anthology or collection because I like to revisit some of them and I want people to pay attention to them. However, if I were to do this for Echoes I would end up listing all thirty stories in the table of contents. An anthology that features names like; Paul Tremblay, Seanan McGuire, Joyce Carol Oates, Gemma Files, SGJ, Bracken MacLeod, Brian Evenson, John Langan and many others in the table of contents, it’s hard to pick a few stories that are good because in all honesty, the entire list of stories from page 1 to page 795 are top quality. It’s easy to see why Ellen Datlow chose the writers that appear here.
However, there is one story that stood out to me more than any of the others. It could be the length of the story as it is one of the longest ones in the anthology or it could be the fact that it’s sandwiched almost right in the middle of the book that made it stand out. Either way, The Surviving Child, by Joyce Carol Oates, is the crown jewel among all of these nearly perfect stories. The story revolves around a woman who is marrying A man who’s son survived a murder/suicide committed by his mother, but his sibling did not. While the story is long compared to the stories it appears next to, it is amazing the amount of detail and the complex story Oates is able to weave in such a small amount of space. Her characters come alive and you feel the heartbreak, sadness, anger and curiosity of each character throughout the story. As expected, there is a supernatural element to the story, but it serves to put even more emotion into an already emotionally charged story.
Overall this massive tome seems daunting as you turn to the first page of the first story, but in under an hour you’ll be two or three stories in and blown away by their quality. You won’t want to put this one down and with each turn of the page you’ll be excited and haunted and ready to see what ghouls the next story has in store.
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