No particular order:
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
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The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Ghost Stories/Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
(Two great collections from Penguin edited by S. T. Joshi that include together all 33 of M R James' complete ghost stories with the complete manuscript of The Fenstanton Witch from "Stories That I have Tried to Write."
And am probably going to double dip and get Ash-Tree's $75 corrected second reprint of A Pleasing Terror due late this year.
Oxford's Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories edited by scholar Michael Cox is a highly recommended collection too but contains only 12 of 15 stories from the first Penguin collection and only 9 of 19 from the second Penguin collection - and lacks the complete manuscript of The Fenstanton Witch.)
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The Best Ghost Stories of J S Le Fanu/Ghost Stories and Mysteries of J S Le Fanu
(Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's complete collection of ghost stories and mysteries compiled into two volumes from Dover however the latter volume above is out of print but obtainable through second hand sources.)
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The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories/The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories/The Thing on The Doorstep and Other Weird Stories
(Penguin's three affordable volumes of H. P. Lovecraft edited by Lovecraft Scholar S. T. Joshi containing the corrected text as HPL's work was constantly assailed by editing by Derfeth and others *Derfeth ironically is also credited with preserving Lovecraft and reintroducing his works to future generations I guess there is a good side to every bad thing and vice versa* and further encouraged by various publishers over the decades. Fortunately, S. T. Joshi exhaustively restored the author's original writings from liberal editing unfortunately the Penguin collection isn't as catagorically organized or as complete as Del Rey's collection of corrupted texts.
And these volumes don't represent the complete HPL but one would have to go through Arkham House and their five volume collection of HCs were priced around $30 a piece sadly some are out of print currently. Egads!
Library of America also released around two dozen stories in their HC volume with S.T. Joshi's corrected texts.)
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I love ghost stories and the supernatural and these author have been well organized in collections unlike other greats such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood which require obtaining several collections.
Also would love to include Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Matheson's Hell House, the two finest contemporary ghost story novels of our time but my list would have little diversity.
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Originally Posted by collinsc
