There is nothing so comforting as a good ghost story. All children have their familiars but as adults we are meant to put irrational fear (and irrational love) behind us. As a small child I was regularly tormented by green and yellow girls who oozed out of the (green and yellow) wall of our lavatory. Ghost stories give you permission to be afraid - and, in some of the stories in David Marcus's excellent anthology, to be very afraid.
But what makes a ghost story Irish? In this collection it is the scarcity of any benign spectres. With the exceptions of Patrick Boyle's tragic young wife in "Rise Up, My Love and Come Away" and a drowned girl hankering after her living admirer in Bryan MacMahon's "The Revenants" (and she is accompanied by one of the most malevolent ghosts in ghouldom), the spirits are a bad lot, out for posthumous mayhem and revenge.
In spite of the gloomy monastic figure on the cover, this is not a collection of saints and scholars and there is plenty of humour as well as horror. John B. Keane's hilarious "You're on Next Sunday" very aptly chooses a dead Kerry hurling team for his haunting. Elizabeth Bowen's splendid "Hand in Glove" has two impoverished fortune hunters driven to reckless schemes to acquire the antique but pristine gloves in their ancient aunt's firmly locked trunk. Lennox Robinson's "A Pair of Muddy Shoes" has a red-headed countryman frustrated at his failure to murder his vexing wife before his own demise.
There is no sickening forensic detail - no mangled bodies or spattered brains - but there is heart-stopping horror in the knocking on the inside of a suitcase by an ancient femur stolen by an anatomist, or a glove gradually bulging out to take the shape of a human hand. What makes these stories special is an exceptional collection of literary talent (William Trevor, Sean O'Faolain, Mary Lavin, Joyce Cary, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph Hone) which understands that no ghost has any real claim on our subconscious unless we come to know the human character that went before.
Outstanding in the collection are Mary Lavin's "The Dead Soldier", in which a mother's yearning for one more glimpse of her dead son threatens to become a dreadful reality, and Lennox Robinson's "A Pair of Muddy Shoes". I am thankful to the book for introducing me to the work of Conall Cearnach, whose "The Captain in the Pipes" is a complex and enthralling tale of terror in the classic tradition which will leave you permanently uneasy at any knocking sounds in your central-heating pipes.
As in all anthologies, there are one or two duds, but I won't name them as they might be someone else's favourites. Apart from these, I found this a riveting - and oddly reassuring - read. My only criticism is that there are so few young writers. Desmond Hogan is the junior by many years and 10 of the 18 contributors are now ghosts themselves. I would have been interested to see if Conor MacPherson could repeat his dramatised haunting of The Weir in the short story form.
Clare Boylan's latest novel, Beloved Stranger, is published by Little, Brown