Book Review: "Mortal Echoes" ed. by Greg Buzwell

Full Title: Mortal Echoes: Encounters with the End edited by Greg Buzwell

Admittedly, this is the second time I have read this book. If you know how my reviews are themed at the moment you will thus notice that I have slipped back into my ways of reading ghost stories. Recently, I have revisited ghost stories I enjoyed once in my teen years as well including the oddities of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the stories of Amelia B Edwards. I was surprised to think that I would enjoy this particular anthology even more than when I first read it some time last year or the year before (I don't remember). But honestly, reading a ghost story anthology or a horror anthology for a second time makes you appreciate all the stranger things about it more than you did last time. It helps you savour the entire thing, tasting it again and therefore, as far as the Tale of the Three Brothers goes - encountering death like an old friend.

This particular anthology is packed full of well-known strange stories from beyond the mortal realm. Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death features as one of the intial openers after a short story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Ambrose Bierce, H.G Wells, Saki, Daphne Du Maurier and Marjorie Bowen are all names that are part of the feature as well. Many of these would be stories that avid readers of the genre have encountered before but, to be compiled in such a way under such a theme as Mortal Echoes seems almost genius. We cannot help but as horror-story-afficianados, appreciate and applaud the great efforts the editor has applied.

One of my favourite stories in the anthology and perhaps one of my favourite short stories of all time is called An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. This story is about a man who is sentenced to hang and, just as this happens we get to see his whole life flash before his eyes in a mix of fact and fiction, a mix of reality and hallucination. What Ambrose Bierce gives us through the story is this contact with the end that we hardly ever get. He slows down the entire scene to elongate it across and entire story and he controls pace with absolute precision and timing in order to make every single little thing happen at the exact moment that it is supposed to. The end of the story is not shocking, but it solidifies the air of sadness that permeates the narrative.

Another story I really enjoyed in this anthology was another I and probably many others have read time and time again: The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's story which tells us the story of a plague called "the Red Death". There is a party at a mansion held by a man who wishes he and his friends to escape this plague but someone weird and scary arrives to remind them of their mortality. As each room is elaborately decorated to resemble the different stages of life, every character encounters this mystery figure as well. With a typical ending of an Edgar Allan Poe story which includes the characters getting just what they deserve, this story really has it all when it comes to classic horror which seeks to only inflict terror and abject fear into whoever reads it.

The last story I will mention is probably the best known in the entire anthology and beyond. Charles Dickens' story The Signal Man is known throughout horror fiction as being one of the most awe-inspiring short stories of all time. Inspired by an actual rail crash in which some people die, there is a constant feeling of impending doom as there is a prophecy of something terrible to come. Charles Dickens' ghost stories are all pretty awesome, but this one is simply incredible beyond all of them.

All in all, I think that this book successfully communicates its title in the best and most twisted ways possible and though this is a second reading through, I feel like the relations between this book and myself are not yet over. The journey has not yet been completed.