Haunting, spine-chilling stories make the flesh creep and play with fear that lurks in the imagination. These ghost stories are perennial hotspots the reader ˙is lured to visit again and again — till as Dickens says that one can hear “...a noise for every nerve in your nervous system.”

Arundhati Nath’s The Phantom's Howl is a pitch-sharp translation of Bengali classic tales of horror by some of the best writers in the language. These hair-raising stories of the late-19th and early-20th centuries were like Fear Factor or XFactor to the Bengali populace of that age, with their often bizarre encounters with the otherworldly. In this collection, the translator has brought together the scariest, spookiest (and a few horrifying but weirdly humorous) of these household favourites to the readers of the present day.

For Nath, her fascination with the supernatural started early with the stories heard from her grandmother — tales of mischievous poltergeists and “bhoot”, who needed to be propitiated else they would not leave.

She displays exceptional proficiency in accurately conveying a pervasive feeling of decay in grand old houses, which often tied to the past with melancholic undertones and its tragic secrets. She aptly describes the macabre, grotesque figures, vengeful and vindictive in Hemendra Kumar Roy’s stories, “The King of Ghosts” and “The House, the Old Man, the Hunting Boots”. Her meticulous attention to detail, cultural awareness, contextual understanding, and a sense of rhythm dictates her choice of words — especially in her translation of Tagore’s “The Skeleton”, “The Famished Stone”, and Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay’s “Paternal Legacy” and “The Spectral Bed”, where she deftly brings out how the author strikes at the concept of home as a repository of safety and stability.

Shadows have been a strong theme for Manik Bandopadhyay, in his short stories and in “The Singed Shadow”, Nath has demonstrated the ambiguity and uncertainty of life evoking a sense of the mysterious and the unknown — as in the original story.

The collection also consists of fascinating stories by lesser known, but equally marvellous writers like Nirad Chandra Mazumdar’s, “The Signal”, Amarendranath Munshi’s, “Inside the Water Spinach Forest Marsh”, Jogeshchandra Bandopadhyaya’s, “The Phantom’s Howl”, and Pramatha Chaudhuri’s, “The First Class Ghost”. In Niradchandra Mazumdar’s  “The Signal”, the translator intensely reflects an escalating sense of dread and unease as the darkness becomes a tangible wall from where dead spirits are expected to rise, baying for the blood of the innocents after waving an apparently innocuous black piece of cloth.

Jogesh Chandra Bandopadhyay’s story with its series of illusions that appear real to the character who is lost and then holed up in a remote house surrounded by a dense forest, is phantasmagorical. The translator is effective in creating a wild ride of a story where the protagonist limbers up for a showdown. What could have been jarring and disjointed aspects of the story transforms into a tale of gore and violence and an intense, unsettling tension which retains its relentless pace till the very end.

The Bengalis are an emotional people given to much display of excitement, which makes many a writer of ghost stories turn the supernatural experiences of the characters into tales of supreme credibility on paper. Readers are convinced and believe those characters, who in the original stories found themselves in haunted forests, mansions and daak bungalows in this collection. Nath has successfully demonstrated through her translations that ghosts are truly universal and are not bound by frontiers. This collection of ghost stories by eight Bengali authors will enliven dull cold journeys, long sleepless nights, and gloomy rainy evenings, while making your flesh crawl. But assuredly you will also enjoy the process of being supremely frightened.