Peripheral Visions (The Collected Ghost Stories)

by Robert Hood

[Cameron Trost]

Peripheral Visions, Volume One, consists of three themed sections; Haunted Places, Haunted Families, and Haunted Minds. In this tome, Robert Hood offers us an array of ghost stories written between 1988 and 2015. There is an impressive degree of variation on show here, from hauntingly atmospheric works of prose to spooky plot-driven ghost stories to science-fiction of the spiritual kind. Robert Hood's writing is stylish, darkly poetic, and often deeply emotional, and the nature of the ghosts in his stories range from tangible apparitions to pure hallucination.
As I generally do when it comes to ghost stories, I found Robert's subtler tales to be his spookiest and most evocative. The only criticism of this collection would be that some of the twist endings won't come as a surprise to readers who are familiar with the genre.
The highlights for me are Necropolis, a doom-and-gloom tale with a punk edge to it from the 1980s, Nobody's Car, a haunting story about an abandoned automobile, Touched, a timeless haunted house story, Maculate Conception, a strange tale about a stained wall, Monstrous Bright Tomorrows, a work of prose rich in metaphor and symbolism, and Last Remains, a haunting tale about moths and human relationships.