"Number Ninety" and Other Ghost Stories

Synopsis

Features fifteen stories, an introduction, and two appendices (an essay on Mrs Croker by Helen C Black, and a glossary of Hindu and Urdu words). Bound together in a svelte black hardback, and with black and white interior illustrations by Paul Lowe, this really is a beautiful volume. So why has BM Croker been, it seems, so unfairly overlooked, especially considering how successful she was amongst her contemporaries, with "Number Ninety", the title story here, published originally in Chapman's Magazine of Fiction alongside the likes of MP Shiel and Arthur Machen. The stories themselves, set mainly in the India of the time, are perfectly of their day. They are similar in that each narrative follows a chilling and sometimes fatal encounter with the netherworld, but that's not to say that they're wholly prescriptive. Where they shine is in the detail; a single sentence, perhaps two, that will resonate in the mind once you are out of the book, out of India, and alone (?) in your bedroom. What is perhaps most impressive is that these stories don't have as their location the bleak and windy moors, or the ruins of castles, farmhouses, ancient monasteries, or indeed any territory common to the ghostly tale. The hot, claustrophobic places in which Croker puts her characters are, however, equally unsettling. These are places and situations that Ramsey Campbell might have written about had he been around a hundred years ago. And it's for this unnerving quality, smoothly and artistically construed, rather than for the plots, most of which are relatively basic, though some less so, that I would recommend this volume.