An Early All Hallows' Eve Extravaganza - The Haunted Looking Glass

I'm celebrating Halloween a little earlier than usual this year, due to a few weeks of planned travel. Still, in true Shangrila Towers tradition, we're going to feature the best the spooky season has to offer. Tonight we'll look at a collection of supernatural stories that I read on my vacation.

If you're a bookworm visiting downtown Charleston, West Virginia, you should check out Taylor Books, a cool independent bookstore with loads of unique and local titles to peruse. I was particularly impressed by the store's dedicated rack of New York Review Books. NYRB publishes eclectic and lesser-known titles from authors old and new, and they're not afraid to publish horror and fantasy.

On the rack, I found The Haunted Looking Glass, an anthology of ghost stories from a murderer's row of 19th and 20th century writers, including Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker. Each of the stories was selected by artist Edward Gorey and given creepy new frontispieces. Most of these tales are a century or older at this point, but they still hold up, and in some ways are a refreshing break from today's horror.