"Ghost stories" is taken loosely in this collection that leans toward the uncanny, but not necessarily scary side of things. Lizza Aiken says in her introduction that her mother had "a gift for sensing odd atmospheres or noticing the unusual in the everyday." Rather than just giving us a fright, these stories are meant to awaken us to a heightened sense of reality, to the layers that lurk behind what we call the real world. This is required if we are to know the fullness of Good as well as encounter Evil. Joan wrote "The world is not a simple place, far from it. The writer's duty is to show that it is an infinitely rich, strange, confusing, mysterious place."