I’ve never heard of Celia Fremlin before but I’ve been enjoying the Faber Stories line and I’m a sucker for ghost stories so I gave Ghostly Stories a shot - and unfortunately it was turrible!
This edition collects two stories: The Hated House and The New House. The Hated House is about a young girl who has the house to herself for the evening while her parents go somewhere. Then a strange girl appears at the door and starts behaving increasingly oddly… The premise is sorta interesting but it never developed in that direction and the twist ending made me roll my eyes at how cornball it was.
At least that story was coherent unlike The New House! This one’s about a woman whose sister had a kid with her boyfriend; that kid’s now grown up and moving into her first house. And… that’s it? I had no idea what was going on really, I just knew I was bored and didn’t care.
There are some fine mini-books in the Faber Stories line like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Come Rain or Come Shine, Sally Rooney’s Mr Salary and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, all of which are definitely worth picking up, but there’s also a few total stinkers in the mix and Celia Fremlin’s Ghostly Stories is one of them.
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