Haunted Hearths & Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories

Catherine Lundoff, editor
Lethe Press

The good news about this creepy collection is that it avoids what a book reviewer whose name escapes me dubbed "the vampire syndrome:" the tendency for the charm or power of a theme to be dissipated when iterated a dozen times. Happily the 17 authors represented here contribute a nice variety of ghostly encounters from the cute to the clich?d to the quirky. The possible bad news is that none of the stories are very scary. Many are romances, involving longing between the living and the dead, or former girlfriends intervening from beyond the grave. (Come to think of it, that raises the possibility of couples counseling lasting for all eternity, which is indeed horrifying!) Standouts include Marilyn Jaye Lewis's poignant "A Path to the Woods", which is more about death than the spectral possibilities that might follow; Elise Matheson's clever and fun "Focus of Desire;" Kathleen Bradean's cute "Words like Candy Conversation Hearts," about a match-making poltergeist; and "The Oath," by Lynne Jamneck, an eerie string of vignettes about a mournful town. There are some clunkers in the mix too, but this unique anthology rises above them.