• This edition includes the following editor’s introduction: From the origin of the tale as a literary genre to one of its great exponents, Andrew Lang.

First published in 1897, ‘The Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ is a curious book written by the excellent poet, historian and anthropologist Andrew Lang.
‘The Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ presents a dense anthology of stories of paranormal entity: premonitions that materialize, ghost apparitions, haunted houses, etc., that the author extracts with extreme rigor from documents or newspapers of the time, from Scottish historiography or even from Icelandic sagas, when they are not the result of his own curious investigations.
‘The Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ is a very entertaining and magnificently written book that if it can interest esoteric lovers, it will undoubtedly fascinate fans of fantastic literature, since the book reveals the ‘sociological’ background of so much great Anglo-Saxon literature, from Henry James to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, passing through Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu. Literature that has made use of this tenebrous subject and whose crowning work is, without doubt, that brilliant ghost story entitled ‘The Turn of the Screw, ‘ a work that only by reading this book by Lang can be understood in its full dimension.