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The stories in A Ghostly Gallery were written over a period of sixty years, the whole length of Joan Aiken’s writing career; some appeared in her very first collections of what her father Conrad Aiken called “Twentieth century Fairy stories for the young of all ages.”


Stories include A Roomful of Leaves, where a boy escapes an unbearable family and disappears into the Elizabethan past, and the luminously uplifting Watkyn Comma about a ghost mouse who rescues a lonely heroine. These stories often inspired by dreams and myths are written to comfort and console. Some appeared in anthologies, such as a Pan Ghost Book, or in her own collections for younger readers, which came out in England and America. As she moved away from overtly scary stories towards the end of her life, these are her gentler tales of mystery and imagination.

Two of the stories have not previously appeared in an Aiken collection.
Dancing in the Air, and Lungewater

She looked like an ordinary Indian girl. But within her she carried a burden of evil, a force that yearned to rend and destroy. And she had travelled 3000 miles, crossing plains, seas and mountains, to bring that force to Arachne.
Arachne – the obscene occult power that had seized Dan Brady’s wife and children and still held them in its evil clutches. Its strength was growing, its tentacles reaching out to trap and enslave the innocent and the unwary.
And now, in a bleak mountain village, Dan Brady, the Night Hunter, prepared to confront a horror that could finally destroy him and all he held dear.