YA Tales of Unnatural Death

John Gordon's short collection, The Burning Baby and Other Ghosts (1992), contains five tales of various ghosts and unnatural deaths. The title story is the best in the book, about a glowing baby that appears in the bonfire that secretly hold the corpse of a murdered pregnant girl. The second story, "Under the Ice," is about a dead body sometimes seen under the ice where some young boys go skating. The remaining three tales get silly—"The Eels" about a haunting be eels after an old woman's grand-daughter is killed.  "The Key" and "Death Wish" are overly complicated and not very rewarding. The vibrancy of the first tale sets a standard unrivaled by any other tale in the book. 

Silly Ghost Stories

The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories (2016) is the latest collection of ghost stories by Susan Hill, known for her novella The Woman in Black (1983) which has been filmed twice. The new volumes contains only four stories, all of them silly in some way.  In the title story, the prank of filling a travelling bag with moths ends up with a man dead. In "Alice Baker" an office worker always has bad smells around her and she doesn't make friends with her co-workers.  Eventually, the narrator figures out she was a ghost. In "The Front Room" a Christian family, feeling charitable, move the husband's unpleasant elderly step-mother into their front room, with predictable awfulness.  "Boy Number 21" concerns a very lonely schoolboy whose one friend goes missing, yet apparently he reappears from time to time. All four stories feel unpolished--with incongruous ideas tossed off to keep the plot moving without regard to the story structure itself. A sad, disappointing little volume.

Dinosaur Tales

Dinosaur Tales (1983) by Ray Bradbury is a slim collection of four short stories, and two poems, overly illustrated by various talented artists with the shackles of black-and-white-only put upon their imaginations. There is a short foreword by Ray Harryhausen, and gung-ho introduction by Bradbury himself, but the end-result is really a fourth-rate product.  Only one of the stories is really good (the class "A Sound of Thunder" from 1951, which has been filmed a couple of times), the rest of the book is the kind of stuff one expects from a book packager who thinks:  "Ray Bradbury wrote a great dinosaur tale and a few other crappy ones, and one that isn't really a dinosaur tale but we can call it one. Let's bring them together with some black-and-white illustrations, and a color cover, that we can get for cheap and make a book of it."  And that's exactly what Byron Preiss Visual Publications Inc. did. The end-result only diminishes the reputations of everyone involved.