Antique Dust

‘Dealers are undertakers of a sort. When a man dies, the undertaker comes for the body, and the dealer comes for the rest. I deal in dead men’s clocks, pipes and swords. Passing through my hands, they give off joy, loneliness, fear . . . I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England.’


So speaks Geoff Ashden, a regular guy trying to make an honest living as an antique dealer, but who has an uncanny knack for finding cursed objects and haunted places: a sinister Georgian clock carved with obscene and Satanic designs, a hideous doll with deadly powers, a pair of old spectacles that let their wearer see a little too clearly, an ugly house with a terrifying secret, a church full of graffiti scrawled in decomposing human flesh. In this collection, award-winning children’s author Robert Westall delivers a set of chilling tales for adults and proves himself, as Orrin Grey writes in the new introduction to this edition, ‘an obvious successor to that godfather of the English ghost story, M.R. James .’


‘[C]reepy . . . develops a sense of palpable evil . . . well worth the time of readers who prefer slyly civilized British ghost-stories’ – Kirkus Reviews


‘Fiendishly clever, spine-tingling short fiction’ – Publishers Weekly


‘Marvelous M. R. Jamesian-style ghost stories’ – Michael Dirda, Washington Post