Tingling Treats for Halloween gathers detective yarns, supernatural mysteries, and ghost stories into a capacious map of the uncanny from antiquity through the modern tale. Its range extends from rational investigation and locked-room suspense to spectral visitation, psychic speculation, Gothic terror, satire, and psychological ambiguity. Classical testimony, fin-de-siècle decadence, Victorian sensation, and early twentieth-century weird fiction converge in memorable hauntings, inexplicable crimes, doubles, apparitions, and narratives that repeatedly unsettle the boundary between evidence and belief. The contributors form an unusually broad transnational company: pioneers of the modern detective story stand beside major Gothic fabulists, realist masters, popular storytellers, spiritualist commentators, and writers associated with the ghost-story revival. Figures such as Poe, Doyle, Hawthorne, Collins, Chekhov, Hoffmann, Maupassant, James, Kipling, London, and Twain bring distinct national traditions and literary temperaments to shared questions of detection, mortality, fraud, conscience, and the persistence of the past. Their assembled voices illuminate the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' intertwined fascinations with science, criminology, occultism, empire, and modern uncertainty. Ideal for Halloween reading as well as for students of genre history, this volume offers a rare opportunity to compare the methods of the sleuth with the evasions of the phantom. Readers will find both pleasurable chills and a richly varied education in the forms through which fiction makes mystery legible—or leaves it provocatively unresolved.
