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Creepy Tales

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"Witches cannot have children in the usual way," Kelly Link tells us. "Their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses." In Link's eerie and engrossing world, brought to life in her short-story collection Magic for Beginners (Harcourt, $14), villagers seeking refuge from murderous raiders should make a faery handbag from the skin of a black dog and hide in it ("If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though," she writes, "you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood"); rabbits mounted by tiny men armed with spears haunt the suburbs; and zombies are regular customers at the local convenience store.

Will Storr's world isn't as far away from Kelly Link's as he might have hoped. The British journalist, who says he "deals only with hard facts," set out to profile a Pennsylvanian "demonologist." "It'd be fantastic," he writes in Will Storr vs. the Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts (Harper, $13.95), "because it concerns an American eccentric, and American eccentrics are . . . more sincere, unabashed and convinced in their madness than any other eccentrics in the world." But then he travels with the demonologist, Lou Gentile, to a house in Bishopville, Md., built on top of a graveyard. After he sits in the dark for several hours with nary a ghostly knock, something spectral touches his back: "There was no momentarily unplaceable sensation, there was no doubt whatsoever." He begins to wonder if Gentile is so eccentric after all: "This is my problem," he writes. "If I accept that ghosts do exist, then the hard walls of my straightforward and rational world fall down like colossal reality dominos. Because if we don't die when we die, then nothing is as it seems and everything is up for questioning."

Best look to science for answers to ghostly questions, suggests Mary Roach in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Norton, $13.95), specifically at respectable universities where researchers follow the scientific method. "What I'm after is proof," she writes. "Or evidence, anyway -- evidence that some form of disembodied consciousness persists when the body closes up shop. Or doesn't persist." She travels to the University of Arizona, where a tenured psychology professor operates a lab that examines how mediums communicate with the dead; she goes to India, where a retired philosophy professor tracks down cases of reincarnation; she finds an English engineer and "psychoacoustics researcher" who has tied apparently supernatural experiences (feeling cold suddenly, tingling in the back of the neck, even seeing a shape out of the corner of one's eye) to "inaudible, low-frequency sound waves -- infrasound" from, say, an overpowered exhaust fan.

Roach tackles what might, or might not, happen after we die. But how do we die in the first place? If we're unlucky, it's through one of the methods outlined in John Emsley's The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison (Oxford Univ., $16.95). Be on guard if your unhappy spouse starts stockpiling mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead and thallium. Emsley describes the properties of each of these elements and then gets down to the dirty business of how they have been used to kill: Mary Ann Cotton used a de-worming compound containing arsenic to murder "her mother, three husbands, a lover, eight of her own children, and seven stepchildren," though not all at once; ; Graham Young used antimony and thallium, "the former to punish, the latter to kill" at least 13 people. "Murder by poison may be a dying art, thanks in no small part to advances in forensic analysis," writes Emsley, but it still provides plenty of ghoulish chills.

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea