Perspective: Check it out

SCARY STORIES O'PLENTY: In time for the season of the witch, Carroll & Graf publishers have released two very scary story collections: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones, and The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories, edited by Peter Haining ($11.95 each). The former offers stories from notable authors Ramsey Campbell, James Herbert and Peter Straub; the latter includes Ruth Rendell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Bloch.

Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder and the Supernatural, edited by Clint Willis (Adrenaline, $16.95), offers 21 short stories on the things we fear the most: ghosts, murder and insanity. Included are writers Robert Frost, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudyard Kipling and Stephen King, and classics The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs, The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.

One Dark Night, collected by Kathleen Blease (Ballantine, $10), is another collection of macabre stories and excerpts, including Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and Mark Twain's A Ghost Story.

The award-winning The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, by Patricia C. McKissack, illustrated by Brian Pinkney (Knopf, $4.99) includes 10 original stories with a foundation in African-American history. This haunting collection, for ages eight and up, not only addresses the scary and supernatural but the very real (and very scary) problem of racism.

HAUNTED VISITS: Hoping to add some ghostly sites to your itinerary on your next trip overseas? From the Green Lady of Crathes Castle in Scotland to the ghosts in the Melbourne State Library in Australia, haunted buildings dot the globe. The International Directory of Haunted Places, by Dennis William Hauck (Penguin, $16), details more than 700 of these spots, covering Great Britain and Europe, Canada, South America, Northern Africa, Australia and Asia. It includes exact locations, phone numbers and internet addresses.

ON THE ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN: Halloween is Paganism's most sacred holiday: All Hallows' Eve, or Festival of the Dead. The Pagan Book of Halloween: A Complete Guide to the Magick, Incantations, Recipes, Spells and Lore (Penguin, $11) shows the way to incorporate some the Halloween's original meanings and rituals into your celebration. Author Gerina Dunwich, a Wiccan High Priestess, explains Paganism: Not a devil-worship cult, but an Earth-worshipping, positive spiritual path. Kind of makes Halloween seem not quite as scary, doesn't it?

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