For eighteen years, while serving as the first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, Robertson Davies wrote an original ghost story to perform at the college’s annual Christmas gathering. 

These are cheerful ghost stories rather than exercises in dread. Davies treats the supernatural as an opportunity for intellectual comedy, elaborate parody and shameless theatricality. Queen Victoria speaks through a collective voice; Charles Dickens, Henrik Ibsen and other cultural dignitaries drift into improbable encounters; the “Ugly Spectre of Sexism” invades the college. The jokes are learned but rarely bloodless: Davies enjoys puncturing scholarly vanity, institutional solemnity and the belief that education makes people any less ridiculous.

The result sits somewhere between the club story, campus satire and old-fashioned Christmas ghost tale. It is particularly suited to readers who like their supernatural fiction sociable, literate and slightly drunk—the afterlife behaving less like an abyss than an unruly faculty meeting.

Penguin Books, 1983 simultaneous hardcover and paperback edition; first published in Canada in 1982. Paperback with moderate cover rubbing, creasing and edge wear; pages lightly age-toned, binding sound.