For The Blood Is The Life And Other Stories - F. Marion Crawford

Below are some book reviews:

Review: For the Blood Is the Life & Other Stories
User Review - Aaron - Goodreads -
Surprisingly good book of "old fashioned" ghost stories. I use quotations because the stories date from 1898-1908 or so, but they feel neither old nor stodgy. Fantastic little book.

User Review - Linda - Goodreads -
Several of the short stories in this book stick with me. They are thought provoking as well as entertaining.

User Review - Jim - Goodreads -
Crawford is to the vampire (short) story what MR James is to the ghost (short) story. Except that nobody remembers Crawford, these days. Along with ANL Munby, he's now shamefully out of print.

User Review - Rachelly - Goodreads -
Lovely creepy Gothic stories, didn't quite make it in time to be considered Victorian. (Published in 1911.) Superb supernatural fiction

User Review - Amazon.com -
By A Customer Fans of ghost stories and horror fiction can't go wrong with this collection, which includes "The Upper Berth"--perhaps the best ghost story ever written. Crawford was one of the finest .
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Table of Contents

The Dead Smile
The Screaming Skull
Man Overboard!
For the Blood Is the Life
The Upper Berth
By the Waters of Paradise
The Doll's Ghost King's Messenger
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Excerpts:

THE DEAD SMILE - Chapeer I
Sir Hugh Ockram smiled as he sat by the open window of his study, in the late August afternoon. A curiously yellow cloud obscured the low sun, and the clear summer light turned lurid, as if it had been suddenly poisoned and polluted by the foul vapours of a plague. Sir Hugh's face seemed, at best, to be made of fine parchment drawn skin-tight over a wooden mask, in which two sunken eyes peered from far within. The eyes peered from under wrinkled lids, alive and watchful like toads in their holes, side by side and exactly alike. But as the light changed, a little yellow glare flashed in each. He smiled, stretching pale lips across discoloured teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt for the human doll.

Nurse Macdonald, who was a hundred years old, said that when Sir Hugh smiled he saw the faces of two women in hell--two dead women he had betrayed. The smile widened.
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THE SCREAMING SKULL
I have often heard it scream. No, I am not nervous, I am not imaginative, and I never believed in ghosts, unless that thing is one. Whatever it is, it hates me almost as much as it hated Luke Pratt, and it screams at me.

If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that some one at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest. I have always blamed myself for Mrs. Pratt's death, and I suppose I was responsible for it in a way, though heaven knows I never wished her anything but long life and happiness. If I had not told that story she might be alive yet. That is why the thing screams at me, I fancy.

About the Author:
Francis Marion Crawford (August 2, 1854 – April 9, 1909) was an American writer noted for his many novels, especially those set in Italy, and for his classic weird and fantastic stories.**
**...summary from wikepedia

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