Review of Ghosts by Gaslight

Dann, Jack, and Gevers, Nick, eds., 2011, Ghosts by Gaslight: stories of steampunk and supernatural suspense, HarperCollins, trade paperback, 389 p., ISBN 978-0-06-199971-0.

My wife insists that this is a stupid premise, that steampunk and the supernatural don't go together. She has a point, but I don't agree. For one thing, opposites sometimes work well together. Ever hear of sweet and sour sauce? More powerfully, how can you go wrong with authors like Peter S. Beagle, Robert Silverberg, and Gene Wolfe? These three, plus 14 more superb artisans of the weird, combine to make a really good book. So maybe the premise is a bit ridiculous, but obviously some of the field's best authors have always wanted to write this kind of story. Almost every story feels as though the author, upon finding out about the proposed anthology, said to him- or herself "This is so cool!" When they got done writing, it was.

In "The unbearable proximity of Mr. Dunn's balloons," John Langan recounts the tale of a sanatorium whose owner employs balloons to ... do what exactly? We know from the title that it's not good, but the best part of the tale is in the telling.

Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, and has been since I read "How I lost the Second World War and helped turn back the German invasion." "Why I was hanged" has the same format. It begins with the ending and then traces the path that led to it. Along the way we meet a ghost that seems to somehow travel through time.

Marly Youmans' "The grave reflection" is a peculiar sort of love story. It begins with a terrible kind of haunting, made more terrible because there seems to be no element of evil involved.

There is a story of a monstrous manuscript, "Face to face," by John Harwood,which is very different from Robert W. Chambers' "The king in yellow," though they come from the same kernel.

I think my favorite story is "Music, when soft voices die," by Peter S. Beagle. The perfect marriage of steampunk and the supernatural, in which bad things happen to good people, and there is music.

Not all of these stories fit the mold. For the life of me, I can't find the steam punk in "the summer palace," by Jeffrey Ford. I am guessing the editors just could not resist such a cool story. A civilization is about to fall, and we are there when it begins to enter interesting times. A number of other entries in this anthology seem light on steampunk and heavy on the supernatural, as well.

So, really: buy this book. Even if you don't usually read short stories. If you like steam punk or tails of the supernatural, trust me: putting the two together really works.


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