The Demanding Dead

Edith Wharton

Selected and Introduced by Peter Haining

‘It is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing.’ – Edith Wharton

With eight outstanding ghost stories by one of the finest writers in the genre, The Demanding Dead is an absorbing collection of tales from Edith Wharton's fertile imagination. Like her mentor Henry James, Wharton had the ability to switch genres seemingly without effort.The Demanding Dead highlights a lesser-known side of Wharton's writing. The same literary genius evident in her famous works such as The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth is here dedicated to giving the reader a damned good scare. Stories such as ‘Kerfol’ (adjudged by aficionados to be Wharton's best ghost story) and ‘Pomegranate Seed’ are perfect illustrations of consummately crafted horror fiction. Wharton's vivid sense of the supernatural betrayed her deeper anxieties about the claustrophobia of domestic life and the pain of a failing relationship.

Taut, suspenseful and surprising, these stories, together with those in their companion volume The Ghost Feeler, establish her as one of the greatest proponents of suspense fiction.

EDITH WHARTON was born in New York in 1862. She wrote more than forty acclaimed literary works, including The Age of Innocence (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), in which her rich, precise and elegant style was the perfect vehicle for a penetrating analysis of European and American society. She died in 1937.