Dread and Delight: A Century of Children’s Ghost Stories

As a genre, children’s ghost writing is a relative newcomer to the literary field. While children’s literature has flourished for over 200 years, supernatural fiction for the young has really only come into its own in the twentieth century. Dread and Delight , a spine-tingling collection of 40
ghost stories written for children over the course of the present century, charts its development from its roots in the writings of authors such as M. R. James, A. C. Benson and Walter de la Mare, to renowned modern authors including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jan Mark, Leon Garfield, and Penelope
Lively.
Compiled by the award-winning novelist Phillipa Pearce, author of the classic children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden , these stories will captivate adults and children alike. Pearce includes two previously unpublished stories by Lucy Boston and Robert Westall, and a full introduction and lively
notes on the authors. The collected stories represent an engaging variety–drawn from all over the English-speaking world, including America, India, and the Caribbean as well as Great Britain. Treating the supernatural with humor and whimsy, as well as with a proper respect, the tales all succeed
brilliantly in creating an atmosphere of suspense or unease in order to produce the pleasurable tingle of anticipation that children relish as much as adults. As Phillip Pearce writes in her introduction, ‘fear becomes awe and wonder…the delight is in the dread’.