THE AFTER MID-NIGHT GHOST BOOK

Atmospheric or amusing rather than scary, these 24 highly varied supernatural stories from the US and England offer a classier sort of writing than usually found in today's occult fiction. And among the contributors are some well-known, distinctive talents. Robert Nye (Falstaff, Merlin) offers a broody, rather obscure prosepoem about the birth of a Welsh chieftain, a swan's egg, and a witch. Fay Weldon writes a grimly ironic tale of jealousy in the servants' quarters--starring an amoral nanny who prefers animals to people and triumphs with Machiavellian ease. Peter Dickinson is in wry good form with ""Mink""--about a husband who gets attacked in the night by his wife's mink coat. And other stories feature time-travel, the Plague, 16th-century poetry, Nazis, and Jewish mothers, with a rich assortment of ambitious styles. Not for the rank-and-file chillerama audience, then, but an appealing collection of literate oddities.