Imagine yourself standing within the four walls of colonial surgeon Sir Dominick Holden’s laboratory after nightfall, only to discover the apparition of a brown man, his right arm ominously absent. Or, if you prefer a different scene, envision yourself lounging by a fireplace, the ominous silhouette of a dried monkey’s paw talisman casting unsettling shadows, while echoes of phantom-knocking reverberate through the room, mingled by the anguished cries of the White couple in the distance. As goosebumps prickle your skin like spectral whispers, you glance upwards, only to realise with relief that it was merely the pages of a book you were immersed in. Such tales, teetering on the edge of the absurd and transcending the boundaries of the natural, are meticulously compiled within Souvik Chakraborty’s latest offering, The World of Ghosts: Dreadful Places & Scary Faces filled with Horror.
Within the crisp pages of this tome, lie not just a mere handful, but a veritable cornucopia of 51 nerve-racking tales, each one meticulously positioned to send shivers cascading down your spine like a haunted waterfall. Penned by luminaries in the realm of supernatural fiction—masters of the macabre such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, E.F. Benson, M.R. James, W.W. Jacobs and Algernon Blackwood, among others—these ghastly narratives promise to grip your soul in a vice-like hold, refusing to release you from their icy grasp until the very last page is turned.
Ah, but the frightful feast doesn’t end there! Venture further into the depths of this chilling compilation, and you’ll encounter a pantheon of horrors beyond your wildest nightmares. Imagine yourself ensnared in H.P. Lovecraft’s web of cosmic dread, as an unknown narrator recounts his abduction by German sea-raiders in the spine-tingling tale of Dagon. Or, perhaps, dare to tread the threshold of Margaret O. Wilson Oliphant’s The Open Door, where a seemingly innocuous portal becomes a gateway to untold terror—a door that leads not to sanctuary, but to the abyss of the unknown.
“They [academicians] posit that deep down all of us yearn for the moments left behind, the golden dawns and rosy dusks of a time that was and shall never be again, and as ghosts essentially are echoes from the past, we take an instant shine to them. Honestly, I can’t find any fault with the analysis,” writes Chakraborty in the preface of his book. “There certainly is something sublime about the past. If a scare or two is the price which I have to pay to bask in the light of other days once more, I am all for it,” the editor and Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) engineer adds.
So, if you dare to turn the key and unlock the secrets hidden within these pages, steel your nerves and prepare to confront the bodachs that dwell in the darkest recesses of the human psyche. For in the realm of the supernatural, where Poe’s raven croaks its ominous refrain and Benson’s spirits apparate with sinister intent, only the bravest souls dare to tread.
The reviewer is a journalist on the staff of The Statesman.