Book Review: ANCIENT GHOSTS

Title: Ancient Ghosts

Author: Edel Marit Gaino

Translator: Olivia Lasky and Lea Simma

Illustrator: Toma Feizo Gas

Publisher: Inhabit Education Books

Pages: 200

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

This book is a collection of ten paranormal stories from Norway. The stories are accompanied by illustrations, black and white impressions, daubs of black ink that grew to resemble the picture that the artist had in mind. There are 25 illustrations in all, including 15 full-page ones.

I found the cover, with its image of a ghastly, skeletal body with sharp claws and fangs, disturbing, yet intriguing.

Unfortunately, most of the stories barely measure up to the fear evoked by the cover image.

The Old Graves On Our Moor: The narrator, a child, learns from his uncle of the finding of a 1000-year-old undecomposed corpse. Later, the child has an encounter with it.

The story isn’t really scary but the sense of brooding atmosphere that the author incorporates into the telling might frighten a child on a dark night.

The Copper Kettle: Three friends set up camp at a wild reindeer bog, where one of them has a frightening experience with a supernatural being.

The third story, The Grouse, is preceded by a note with a trigger warning for sexual assault and the numbers of two helplines. This story was really scary but there is nothing paranormal about it. This one is about the depravity of men.

The Mudhole is another story about the real danger posed by quicksand.

In The Mirror, two teenage girls, playing around with an old superstition on New Year’s Day, learn a lesson.

In The Raven, the shooting of a raven ensures the end of a hunter’s shooting adventures.

The Dream-Seers: This one was more of an anecdote than a real story.

None of these stories are likely to give you sleepless nights, but even the momentary sense of unease can be effective in a well-written story.

But the heavyweights, it seems, had been saved to bring up the rear in this book. The Four-Eyed Dog was one story that really gave me the shivers.

The Invisible Dog started out really scary. It even built on the promise, but the conclusion undid the effect.

The scariest of the lot was the last story, The Fishing Trip, which was beautifully written. This was the only story in which the terror was actually palpable and not something to be nurtured by one’s imagination. 

(I read this book on Edelweiss. Thank you to the author, the publisher and Edelweiss.)