I liked the book. The faves are all there. "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". A few I had never heard of before. Good stuff. Glad I read it. ( )

Washington Irving’s famous story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, both anchors and outshines all of the other stories in this collection. Everyone knows the story of the headless horseman. But what is surprising here is the ambiguity in explanation in Irving’s story. Is the headless horseman a real demon, or is Ichabod Crane the brunt of a rival suitor’s frightening practical joke?

In many of the other ‘macabre’ tales collected here, Irving strikes the same ambiguous tone, falling short of embracing the supernatural. He leaves just enough of a possibility that the explanation for the odd events is an overactive imagination or a misunderstanding. For instance, in “The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture”, the narrator reveals that the host of a ghost-telling party had purposefully planted a seed in the mind of the guests to see how many of them could work themselves into a frightened frenzy. And in “The Spectre Bridegroom”, the ‘ghost’ is a man who purposely holds himself out as a dead man in order to gain access to a young lady.

Besides “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, my favorite story was “The Adventure of the German Student”. In this tale, the ambiguity in the telling of the story is whether the young German student is of sound mind and body, given a great deal of isolation and depression, when he brings home a bride who has literally just lost her head.

Well over half of the ‘macabre’ tales are really pirate or swashbuckling tales. And while there is always a good deal of the supernatural with pirates, these stories are not as much fun as the darker, more gothic ones.

Bottom Line: A fun collection of ghost and odd tales, though fans of the pirate genre will be happy to find over half the collection devoted to buried treasure and the like.

3 ½ bones!!!! ( )