I have been a very big fan of Ruskin Bond but I don’t like it when publishers deliberately use his name to make a profit more than the value of the contents of the book.
In "The Laughing Skull", don’t expect stories that will chill your bones; rather, the stories are a eclectic mix of friendly ghosts, fairy tale and the author’s own brushes with the seemingly supernatural, but nothing to push to over the edge of a cliff in fright. I would best classify this collection as directed towards children, Ruskin Bond’s favourite target audience.
The book has the following stories: Laughing Skull
Susanna’s Seven Husbands
The Overcoat
On Fairy Hill
Bhoot Aunty
A Face in the Dark
The Chakrata Cat
From the Primaeval Past
Some Hill Stations Ghosts
Pret in the House
A Traveller’s Tale
A Dreadful Gurgle
He Who Rides Tiger
The Wind on the Haunted Hill
He said it with Arsenic
A job well done
Face Under the Pillow
A Demon For Work
The Happy Herdsman
The Tiger King’s Gift
The Wicked Guru
The Ghost and the Idiot
Eyes of the Cat
The White Pigeon
The sad part is, half of the stories or excerpts had been published before, which is not fair on the part of the publishers to put it up in each subsequent new publications. The book is fraught with silly grammatical errors, like punctuations. I won’t discuss about the stories in detail, because a readers, one needs to go through them to judge for themselves.