Publishing creates strange bedfellows. A new magazine has just hit the shelves in Italy, in which I find myself side by side with Robert E. Howard, Lin carter and Pu Songling.
Now Pu Songling was a weird chap.
He spent his life collecting ghost stories and other strange tales, and circulated them among his friends, privately, because stories of the supernatural were not considered a proper thing to take an interest into according to the dominating Confucian culture of the time.
This was, after all, the Qing dynasty.
Today, Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi, translated as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a well known and much loved classic. It can be found in a number of translations, and it inspired a number of movies and plays and whatnot.
It is probably the first stop for anyone interested in Chinese supernatural and folk tales. Continue reading
Tag Archives: oriental ghost stories
Ghosts from the East
Let’s leave Egypt behind for a while.
Last week my friend Lucy published her new novel, the first with Acheron Books. It’s called Nightbird and it’s a ghost story1.
So we had the opportunity of talking a lot about ghost stories, and our favorite novels, movies and what not. It was fun. It also turned out that Lucy would love to write a vampire novel, while I’d love to write a few ghost stories. And as we talked about books, I realized that while I love Peter Straub’s Ghost Story or James Herbert’s David Ash books, what I really like is ghostly short stories. The sort you can read in one sitting, and be scared and entertained.
And so I started compiling a list of my favorite collections of ghost stories. Continue reading
Karavansara 