Ghost camera

Australian horrormeister Coates revives and revises the title novella, her very first ghostly tale, adding another long story and seven shorter shivers. Beware of Polaroid cameras you find while circling more and more widely around your buddy's wedding reception. Jenine imprudently starts snapping pictures of the wedding party and soon notices spectral presences in the background. Her best friend, Breanna, who owns a flower shop, encourages her to get in touch with respected ghost researcher Richard Holt, whose advice is terse: crush and burn that camera posthaste. By this time, Jenine has already snapped more pictures that reveal more ghosts; in a follow-up consultation with Holt, she learns that he had tried to help two other people who found ghost cameras that snapped photos breaching the boundary between the living and the dead, exposing them to deadly peril, which makes Jenine and Bree fear that it's too late for them, too. In the other long story, "A Box of Tapes," concerned mother Tess finds a sealed box of VHS tapes inexplicably nestled in the closet of her 4-year-old daughter, Kayla. "DON'T WATCH. YOU'LL REGRET IT," advises an attached note, but Tess, like Jenine, ignores this advice, and the consequences are equally dire. The briefer stories are more invested in laying out a menacing premise than in developing a sustained plot from it. The most notable of them are "Untamed Things," in which the only two survivors of an airline crash lean into each other in the hope of attracting possible rescuers, and "Cathedral," which moves directly from a leisurely opening to a whiplash punchline. Baleful dispatches from the spirit world. They're watching, they're powerful, and they're not happy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.