THE AUTHENTIC SHUDDER

Oddly, the publishers classify this as non-fiction. Author Armstrong tells his dozens upon dozens of supernatural anecdotes in a mixed bag of styles: flat, straight-faced repertorial ""objectivity,"" bald naivete, and in prose with a gothic goosebump. That is, one can't tell when he's telling a true story and when he's making mainly a stretcher. What confuses the reader is that real people keep showing up in the text to verify the incidents. But, uh, screaming skulls? poltergeists in British manses? corpses photographed walking on the ocean? pshaw! Other stories are about ghost animals, a girl suicide who returns as a white hare, the ghost of Anne Boleyn which was last seen in 1933 carrying her head through the Tower of London.... Impressionable young people reading in the dead of night might surrender to this book's spirit.