In the Dead of Night — Jess Mowry

Anthologies of classic ghost stories - especially such spine-tingling tales as 'The Mezzotint' by M.R. James, 'The Upper Berth' by F. Marion Crawford, and 'The Dead Valley' by Ralph Adams Cram - have abounded since the late 19th century, proliferating as the 20th advanced and copyrights expired, and multiplying a thousand-fold with the advent of the Internet, when first anyone with a scanner could resurrect them out of a book and post them on a web site; then still ever-increasing as people copied the text from their screens and re-posted it on other sites. So common has this become that today anyone with Web access can read these stories free. So why should anyone want to pay for this anthology? Aside from stubbornly clinging (despite all apparent contrary evidence) to the belief that a few decent people still think a living author deserves to be paid for their work - even if, in this case, that work is merely compiling, copy-editing and formatting the work of authors long dead - one reason, I hope, is that my readers might be interested in what I read as a youth and what I think makes a great and scary ghost tale. Regarding Internet incarnations of these stories, the quality, format, and integrity vary. Scanning devices make mistakes; and many people who've scanned and republished these stories online seem to have picked whatever book, magazine or anthology was convenient for the purpose and in many cases have only published much later reprints with text omissions, abridgments and typos, while often making more typos. I have tried to present the stories here as closely as I could to their original, first-published incarnations -- as I as a kid read most of them -- rather than simply copy them from later reprints, recent anthologies, or Internet sites. While I can't resurrect the atmosphere in which I first read these stories, either while perusing them in the dank and dark of a creepy old junk shop, or alone in my room in the dead of night in a spooky old Victorian house, nor conjure up the graveyard smell of dusty, decomposing books, still I hope you'll discover shivers and frights in these thirteen classic ghost stories. Jess Mowry - 2017