Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms

Introduction

Introduction

A writer’s career, like life itself, is a journey. Like artists and philosophers, writers tend to spend more time admiring the scenery than people just hurrying through. Something catches our eye, and we stop to examine it awhile before moving on—and in the process of examination, our lives and our perspectives are irrevocably changed.

These stories are stops I made along my particular journey, vista points on my personal path. If I stumbled across something pleasant, I smiled and made a note. If I saw something disturbing, that too was recorded. I seemed to find them in about an even mix.

Some of the stories in here are intended to be funny. Some are intended to be not funny. I hope I’m a good enough writer for you to tell which are which.

To explain this book’s title—I find girls/women/females in general to be one of Nature’s most wonderful, fascinating, mysterious, and hypnotic phenomena. I love them. As a source of infinite variety and wonder, they feature prominently in my work. The ghosts and other phantasms are there because I’m a speculative fiction writer; it’s what I do.

NOTE: This book contains most of my “solo” stories, which were also published in my earlier collection, The Last Ghost and Other Stories. The “Angel in Black” stories have been broken out into their own volume.

Stephen Goldin