Spooky season is around the corner and it’s the perfect time to read some ghost stories. The Book, ‘The Ghost Variations’ is a collection of 100 haunting stories about different ghost stories with different genres, and a collection of different emotions other than the scare factor. There are different genres such as ghosts and nature, ghosts and romance, and last but not least ghosts with animals. The author does a good way of pushing readers’ imaginations with “out of the norm” ghost stories. A story that caught my eye was a ghost story of never-ending ghosts’ afterlives, describing it as a ¨ ghost after life-life¨. Each story has a different plot line and they’re really short stories of 2-3 pages each, the stories are fast-paced, which is good for people who like fast-paced stories. 

The first story that really caught my attention was “A Moment However Small,” which is a story about ghosts and directions. The ghost was living in the house that she was haunting and then ended up getting lost. This story really gathers the emotion of the ghost that ended up getting lost and away from her home. The ghost doesn’t want to ask for help because of her getting ignored, and we can witness the distress that the ghost is going through. I liked this specific story because it’s not a typical “ghost story” and emotion that you don’t typically see in a ghost book. 

“The Whirl of Time” is a ghost story about time, it starts off the story talking about how time affects the world and even the ghost living in the world. The author, Brockmeier, uses really good metaphors and wording that brings in the reader. A strong line that really dragged me into the story was, “..And some of the clocks were people, their hearts pumping out the seconds.” This line makes the reader think about time in a different way, and how it affects people. The story describes a ghost’s feelings when he watches the people he haunts lose themselves to time and they finally die. This story has a lot of details and wording that can make the reader lose themselves in the story and want to read more. 

The fact that the book itself is a collection of 100 different ghost stories and the stories are short, being 1-2 pages, it’s really easy to get the feeling of disappointment of not being able to read more of the stories. Getting drawn into the stories is really easy to do, but it’s also hard to connect to certain characters. Sometimes in the story, you may find yourself dozing out or reading too fast and may not recall the certain stories you’ve read, because of how short the passages are. Overall, if you want a spooktastic book to haunt up your Halloween seasons, the book variations are a good book for you, and the book’s overall rating would be 3.5/5.