These twenty-nine stories, including all new works from New York Times bestselling authors Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay, span from the traditional to the eclectic, from the mainstream to the literary, from pure fantasy to the bizarrely supernatural.
... an absolute behemoth of an anthology, with all pieces minus three reprints original to the book ... The sheer volume of work Datlow has collected in Echoes fills out the nooks and crannies of the theme with gusto ... allows the reader to compare and contrast expectations of genre as well as the shapes the ghost stories take given those expectations, which is especially fun when they’re all tucked next to each other. The stories are also individually of a high caliber, surprisingly varied though most of their narrative arcs bear certain similarities in tone and structure. Datlow delivers a compelling and satisfying collection of pieces that are either doing something new or doing the old thing just right ... a balanced book as a whole, though, and remains readable throughout its hefty length, never growing stale or repetitive despite the shared theme. While I wouldn’t recommend making a go at reading the entire thing at once, it maintains its tension through uninterrupted stretches of reading, buoyed along through Datlow’s skilled editorial arrangement to keep the pacing and approaches variable. As a fan of ghost stories I was immensely satisfied by the big tome, and I’d recommend it for anyone else who wants to curl up around a spooky yarn—some of which are provocative, some of which are straightforward, all of which fit together well.
... [a] stellar collection ... The diverse contents show a respect for the rich and long tradition of ghost storytelling that does not simply rehash old tales. Instead, these twenty-first-century ghost stories are as complicated and varied as our times. Tales that terrorize sit next to stories that creep; slow-burn atmospheric pieces can be found beside tales that are in-your-face from the very first sentence. This volume impressively presents today’s horror through its most visceral and universal trope, thought-provoking tales about death and beyond. Fans of ghost stories from throughout history will haunt your library looking for a copy, especially those who like their modern iterations found in novels like Slade House by David Mitchell (2015) and novellas like The Grownup (2015) by Gillian Flynn and Mapping the Interior (2017) by Stephen Graham Jones.
... spine-tingling ... Captivating and utterly creepy, this is a book to curl up with by the fire on a stormy night—just hope that the lights don’t go out.
