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Title: A Bottomless Grave

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Narrator: Cathy Dobson

Format: Unabridged

Length: 17 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-01-13

Publisher: Red Door Audiobooks

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 9 votes

Genres: Classics, American Literature

Publisher's Summary:

A dysfunctional and amoral family murders its alcoholic father and buries him in the yard, before embarking on a hobby of befriending strangers whose bodies they bury in the cellar. When the stocks of liquor and provisions kept in the cellar start to deplete mysteriously, they put it down to the partying of the restless spirits of their murder victims...but a stranger truth emerges. Written in Bierce's witty style, this story is a laugh-a-minute comedy.

Members Reviews:

Try not to be a bride in a ghost story

If you're looking for ghosts in your ghost stories, this book might disappoint you. Even the cover story, "A Bottomless Grave" has no ghost. However we do have Victorian witches, psychic detectives, con artists, revenge-suicides, and grave-robbers.

There are three humorous ghost stories, which editor Hugh Lamb realizes are not to everyone's taste so he issues an advance warning: "I've put them all together so that those in quest of thrills alone may bypass them if they wish."

I did indeed wish. One of them, "A Ghost Slayer" by J. Keighley Snowden is written in dialect and almost impossible to read, anyway.

Lamb writes very detailed introductions featuring the authors, so if you have an interest in obscure Victorian writers, this book is well worth its purchase price. And there are a handful of scary stories--some even have ghosts in them. Here are my favorites among the twenty-one tales in this collection:

"The Ship that saw a Ghost" by Frank Norris--A very atmospheric tale of a tramp steamer and an ancient three-masted derelict that first appears in "the red eye of the setting moon."

"The Man with the Nose" by Rhoda Broughton--A bride on an extended honeymoon keeps seeing a sinister figure with a prominent nose. The story reminds me of Le Fanu's "Schalken the Painter." It's tough to be a bride in a ghost story--sort of like being an extra in a 'Star Trek' episode.

"The Haunted Chair" by Richard Marsh--Members of an exclusive London club keep seeing a disreputable gambler who was supposedly exiled to Ceylon. He also seems to be stealing their wallets.

"The Story of Baelbrow" by E. and H. Heron--Flaxman Low, scientist and psychic detective is called into a haunted house when a housemaid is found dead in a corridor with a mysterious pustule behind her ear. Did the family ghost suddenly discover a taste for blood? Why is it biting folks behind their ears?

Great book filled with Victorian Era spooky stories!

If you are into classic horror, mystery, and suspense, then this is a must have book for your collection! Very cool short stories written in the Victorian era and the authors suck you in with their unique writing styles.

A Nice Collection

As one could expect in an anthology, some of the stories are better than others but overall pretty good. There is also a wide range of styles; from comedic to morbid, there is more here than just traditional Victorian ghost stories (but there are a few of those too).

Guy de Maupassant's "The Tomb" stands out as possibly the most disturbing of lot.