Overbooked Book Lists

Ghostly Stars

Page Modified: June 19, 2009

Books about ghosts and hauntings - the spirits will move you . . .

Fiction

• Coldheart Canyon
  Author: Barker, Clive
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 27.95 ISBN: 0060182970 Date: 2001
  PW
  Clive Barker returns with his most triumphant novel to date. Coldheart Canyon is a savage, poignant ghost story set in the glittering world of Hollywood where nothing is what it seems--even Death.
  Suggested Reading: Hollywood Film Stars | Nip Tuck Plastic Surgery Stars
• Tamsin
  Author: Beagle, Peter
  Publisher: Roc $ 21.95 ISBN: 0451457633 Date: 1999
  PW
  Tamsin is a young woman who died over 300 years ago. Jennifer is a young American transplanted to England. They are two lonely souls on opposite sides of life and death - a boundary they are both about to cross . . .
  
• Dead Lines
  Author: Bear, Greg
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345448375 Date: 2004
  Kirkus
  This gripping ghost story for fans of Dean Koontz and Stephen King is the most mainstream novel yet from an author who knows how to mix scientific ideas with gripping narrative.
  Suggested Reading: Woo Woo Stars
  Updated 3.25.04
• In the Country of the Young
  Author: Carey, Lisa
  Publisher: Morrow $ 24 ISBN: 0380976757 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  From the author of The Mermaids Singing comes a haunting, lyrical story of love in all its many guises, set on an island off the coast of Maine. It's the story of a middle-aged artist who receives a visit from the ghost of a shipwrecked girl, beckoned on a quiet All Hallows Eve by a candle left burning in the window.
  Updated 10/13/00
• The Dark: New Ghost Stories
  Author: Datlow, Ellen (ed)
  Publisher: Tor $ 25.95 ISBN: 0765304449 Date: 2003
  PW
  Datlow, referred to by some as the Mistress of Horror, has gathered ghost stories by 15 masters of the macabre in this deliciously frightening anthology of original terror.
  Suggested Reading: Scary Stars
  Updated 10.20.03
• The Mercy of Thin Air
  Author: Dominque, Ronlyn
  Publisher: Atria $ 24 ISBN: 0743278801 Date: 2005
  LJ
  This first-time author offers a stunning, imaginative love story that tests the boundaries of time, grief, and death.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts
  Updated 7.12.05
• Joplin's Ghost
  Author: Due, Tananarive
  Publisher: Atria $ 25 ISBN: 0743449037 Date: 2005
  PW
  An acclaimed suspense writer's latest chilling tale examines how the daughter of a musician and jazz club owner finds her life changed when she becomes haunted by the ghost of Scott Joplin.
  Suggested Reading: African American Stars | Music
  Updated 7.25.05
• Rides of the Midway
  Author: Durkee, Lee
  Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 039304971x Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  Funny and dark, Rides of the Midway is a brilliantly told story about a boy whose life spins completely out of control. He is haunted by the specter of the boy he knocked into a coma while sliding into home in Little League and by the spirit of his father who died in Vietnam. But Noel is equally haunted by his embarrassing failures with girls and his own dark secrets.
  Updated 12/5/00
• Madeleine's Ghost: A Novel of New York, New Orleans and the Next World
  Author: Girardi, Robert
  Publisher: Delacorte $ 21.95 ISBN: 0385314825 Date: 1995
  PW Kirkus LJ
  A stunning novel that takes readers along the back streets of Brooklyn and New Orleans, though this world and into the next. As rocks begin to fall from the ceiling of Ned Conti's rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment, so begins his journey . . . to turn a long-dead nun into Brooklyn's first saint . . . to resurrect the one love affair that continues to haunt him . . . to understand the quest of the feisty ghost who lives with him. . . .
  Updated 8.2.05
• Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics
  Author: Goldstein, Rebecca
  Publisher: Houghton $ 23 ISBN: 0395986591 Date: 2000
  LJ
  This grand Gothic novel is about the outer reaches of passion--of the body and of the mind--and about the betrayals that so often breed in that perilous place. Properties of Light carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light.
  Updated 7/20/00
• The Dead Fathers Club
  Author: Haig, Matt
  Publisher: Viking $ 23.95 ISBN: 9780670038336 Date: 2007
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  Eleven-year-old Philip Noble has a big problem. It all begins when his dad appears as a ghost at his own funeral and introduces Philip to the Dead Fathers Club. Philip learns the truth about ghosts: the only people who end up ghosts are MURDERED. So begins Philip's quest to avenge his dad. Hilariously funny, it is full of poignant insights into the strange workings of the world seen through the eyes of a child.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 12.1.06
• With
  Author: Harington, Donald
  Publisher: Toby $ 19.95 ISBN: 1592640508 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  The newest novel from the master of Stay More, Harington's mythical village in the Arkansas Ozarks, in which a peaceable kingdom is created in isolation from a most bizarre abduction gone wrong.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 3.22.04
• Ghost Writer
  Author: Harwood, John
  Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151010749 Date: 2004
  Kirkus
  Harwood's tantalizing tale of suspense and family secrets weaves Victorian ghost stories into the present where they start to come true. This astonishing, assured debut shows just how dangerous family skeletons--and stories--can be.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts | Psychological Suspense Stars
  Updated 4.26.04
• Heart-Shaped Box
  Author: Hill, Joe
  Publisher: Morrow $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780061147937 Date: 2007
  LJ
  Sooner or later the dead catch up, as Judas Coyne buys a ghost for sale on the Internet. This pulse-pounding supernatural thriller is a remarkable debut novel from a blazing new talent.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts
  Updated 12.27.06
• The Two Sams: Ghost Stories
  Author: Hirshberg, Glen
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 23 ISBN: 0786712254 Date: 2003
  PW
  With this unique collection, acclaimed author Glen Hirshberg breathes new life into an age-old literary tradition.
  Updated 9.22.03
• So I Am Glad
  Author: Kennedy, A.L.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 0375407316 Date: 2000
  PW Library Journal
  In a new kind of ghost story, prizewinning novelist A.L. Kennedy follows the moving and hilarious windings of a love affair between a young Scottish woman and a man who claims to be, and perhaps is, the ghost of Cyrano de Bergerac.
  Suggested Reading: Scottish Stars
• Bag of Bones
  Author: King, Stephen
  Publisher: Scribner $ 28 ISBN: 0684853507 Date: 1998
  Kirkus PW
  Stephen King, master of heart-stopping, page-turning suspense, now brings readers his most gripping and unforgettable novel to date - a story of grief and a lost love's enduring bonds, of a new love haunted by secrets of the past, of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire of natural and supernatural forces.
  Suggested Reading: Scary Stars
• Eva Moves the Furniture
  Author: Livesey, Margot
  Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805068015 Date: 2001
  Kirkus PW
  From a highly acclaimed author comes the enchanting story of a motherless young woman torn between real life and the otherworldly companions only she can see.
  Updated 7/27/01
• The Bell-Witch: An American Haunting
  Monahan, Brent
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $20.95 ISBN: 031215061x Date: 1997
  Kirkus
  The fantastic story of the only documented case in American history when a spirit actually killed a man, this book recounts the Bell Witch's entire story in exacting, horrifying, fascinating detail. Illustrated with line drawing from the period, this book is a wonderfully macabre and atmospheric tale.
  
• Life After Death
  Author: Muske-Dukes, Carol
  Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375505156 Date: 2001
  PW Booklist
  Life After Death is the seriocomic journey of a woman who must work through her husband's death--and reappearances--to find out who he really was, who she really is, and whether she can reclaim her own life.
  Updated 6/4/01
• The Night Country: Or, the Darkness on the Edge of Town
  Author: O'Nan, Stewart
  Publisher: FSG $ 22 ISBN: 0374222150 Date: 2003
  LJ
  A strange and unsettling ghost story in the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson, The Night Country creeps through the streets of one bedroom community, reaching into the connected yet isolated lives of three people changed forever by a car accident.
  Updated 8.14.03
• The Unburied
  Author: Palliser, Charles
  Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374280355 Date: 1999
  PW LJ
  Three separate tales are interwoven in this novel about Dr. Courtine, an unworldly academic, who is invited to spend the days before Christmas with an old friend. Doubly distracted, he becomes unwittingly enmeshed in the sequence of terrible events that follows his arrival.
  Updated 8.2.05