In 'The Dolls Ghost', American author Frances Marion Crawford takes his horror from the violent streets of London with a sentimental tale of a broken doll and a lost child before H.R. I've read this little tale of black magic and ghostly revenge a few times now and it's ubiquity can make it easy to overlook and it's easy to forget just how fantastic a story it is. So, in a book of kiddie-centric tales of the macabre and the supernatural there's one story that's pretty much guaranteed to feature and here it opens the proceedings, M.R. Most of the stories date from the very early 20th century with a couple from the late mid and features a nice variety of top notch names from both sides of the Atlantic. The main focus of this volume is children and each story features them centrally as either victim or, and far more satisfyingly, as perpetrator. This latest one to make it's way off the shelf is one of a phenomenal number of these things put together by anthologist extraordinaire Peter Haining. I'm making a concerted effort at the moment to work my way through as many of these little old anthologies as I can as they're getting buried on the bookshelf.
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