If ghosts represent incarnations of their former identities trapped in a dreamlike state, are they still subject to corporeal emotions: fear, anger, melancholy, lust, longing, love, or vengeance? And are ghosts only meaningful when juxtaposed against the living, still playing their phantom hands through spiritual agency? This collection of short ghost stories demonstrates an assortment of ethereal experiences. Asylum inmates lying in wait for a pair of urban spelunkers. An authentic phantom who makes herself at home in a Halloween funhouse. A doppelganger. A pair of skeletons, sold at...

Exit the world of the living. Enter the realm of the dead. Among these stories, meet the foundlings of Holy Innocents Orphanage, an unstable spirit in the grip of a magnetic attraction, an unscrupulous corporate executive, a mutant monster, and a ravenous walk-in. "Short story writer Bird (Nightmare and Nostalgia, 2013) offers five tales of the fantastic, most involving haunted (or haunting) females. The author makes ghost stories her specialty in this collection, and hers are of an especially gentle variety, grounded more in emotion than horror..." "Bird distinguishes her tales with...