The Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Dennis Pepper (OUP, £6.99 in UK)

I doubt that a generation of young folk raised on the visibly grisly delights of Point Horror and Stephen King would be greatly scarified by these rather sedate stories, which feature a predictable assortment of mysterious dogs, creepy old houses (why are new houses never creepy?), coffins, phantom steam trains and miserable old misers; but the editor of this anthology, Dennis Pepper, still reckons it's worth doing. "There's more to ghosts than first meets the eye," he declares bravely; and perhaps he's right. Bravely, too, he has opted for a mixture of material by children's writers - Philippa Pearce, Jan Mark, Adele Geras and Vivien Alcock - and authors who write mainly for adults like Marjorie Bowen, E. Nesbit, Elizabeth Walter and Mary Williams. But I still think these are ghost stories for the faint-hearted.