The New Uncanny by Sarah Eyre & Ra PageGhost Stories by Peter Washington

Tales of the uncanny are a universal phenomenon, but it was only in this country in the late 19th century that they were domesticated, turned into a suitable accompaniment for a hearthside snack and glass of madeira. Nobody can ever be really scared by an MR James ghost story – at most, they allow the sophisticated reader to play with the idea of being scared. The supernatural element is overwhelmed by cosy details, the clubbable pettiness of golf-course and senior common room, and the authorial voice, tinged with amused scepticism. The habit of swaddling terror in humour or irony has remained: even Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, one of the most genuinely unnerving ghost stories of recent years, is a Victorian pastiche.

The laudable aim behind Ra Page and Sarah Eyre's anthology The New Uncanny is to move beyond pastiche, using contemporary settings and themes to generate genuinely modern forms of unease. As Ra Page explains in a thoughtful introduction, the editors took as their template Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny", sending copies to all the contributing authors. Freud's German title, Das Unheimliche, translates as "the un-homely", though a better rendering might be "unfamiliar".

Freud's idea was that what lies behind our sense of the uncanny is the infiltration of the familiar by strangeness. He identified eight uncanny tropes: inanimate objects mistaken as animate (such as dolls); animate beings behaving as if inanimate; being blinded; the double; coincidences or repetitions; being buried alive; some all-controlling evil genius; and confusions between reality and imagination. From this distance it seems an eccentric list, and the stories it inspires are also somewhat spotty, both in terms of topics covered and their success in instilling unease. Some stories are too gentle on the reader; in one or two others, the imperative to shock leaves no room for the more insidious ways of working on the emotions that Freud had in mind.

The most popular theme by some way is dolls. The most straightforwardly traditional story is AS Byatt's "Dolls' Eyes", in which a doll appears to become an agent of revenge – too straightforward to meet the brief, but enjoyable. "The Dummy" by Nicholas Royle also fits into a tradition that goes back at as far as the mad ventriloquist played by Michael Redgrave in the 1947 film Dead of Night, but Royle develops it cleverly, ending on an authentically queasy note. By contrast, Matthew Holness's "Possum", which features a doll made from dead dog parts and razor blades, is one of the stories that succumbs to nastiness.

The question of why the doll is so popular is partly answered by the writers who update theirs for the digital age: we are surrounded by mechanical constructions that seem to speak and think. Adam Marek's "Tamagotchi" twists a conventional pun on the idea of a computer virus, but the story ends too abruptly, while the idea still has mileage. In "Continuous Manipulation", Frank Cottrell Boyce detects a real unpleasantness lurking in the simulated families of the computer game Sims; but he overplays his hand, leaving no room for ambiguity. Jane Rogers makes the opposite mistake: her story, about an automatic foot-massage machine at an airport seizing hold of a woman's feet, fizzles out into a dull anecdote about mechanical failure.

Most other stories feature doubles of one sort or another: I enjoyed the tricksiness and hyper-erudition of "The Un(heim)lich(e) Man(oeuvre)" by the Bradford-based poet Ian Duhig – a kind of skit on James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with the internet and terrorism thrown in. Sara Maitland's "Seeing Double" is, given that it is based on the real case of a man who had his twin's face growing on the back of his head, unnecessarily bookish. Some stories are hard to place in Freud's scheme. "The Sorting Out", by Christopher Priest, is at bottom an old-fashioned yarn about a woman stuck in a house with a secret intruder, or sharer: but this intruder, with his mania for sorting bookshelves, doesn't fit any boxes. "Anette and I Are Fucking in Hell", by Israeli author Etgar Keret, is an authentic vision of damnation and sexual revulsion, but belongs somewhere else. Likewise Hanif Kureishi's "Long Ago, Yesterday", in which a man finds himself drinking in a pub with his late father, and Ramsey Campbell's "Double Room", in which a recently widowed hotel guest hears his double taunting himself from the next room.

Both are stories about grief, about how the dead linger on and how difficult it sometimes is to distinguish them from the living. In this respect, they are closer in tone to some of the ghost stories in Peter Washington's new Everyman volume. Though this elegant collection features a fair number of classical stories – Stevenson's "The Body-Snatcher", WW Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw", and MR James's splendid "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" – they are outnumbered by variants. Saki's "The Open Window" and PG Wodehouse's "Honeysuckle Cottage" are witty gags about genre clichés and the gullibility of audiences.

In fact, the best ghost stories don't demand credulity: Guy de Maupassant's vampire tale "The Horla" and Henry James's "The Friends of the Friends", like The Turn of the Screw, dangle the possibility that what we are hearing is the outpouring of a mad soul, more horrifying than any ghost.

A good many of the stories have nothing to do with ghosts in the accepted, supernatural sense. In "The Daughters of the Late Colonel", Katherine Mansfield is concerned, like Kureishi and Campbell, with the way the dead haunt us even without stirring from their graves. Even in this naturalistic sense, it's hard to see how ghosts fit into Eudora Welty's "Clytie", which describes an eccentric old spinster trapped in her miserable, inward-gazing family. There are no ghosts at all in Nabokov's "The Visit to the Museum" and Borges' "The Circular Ruins" - but perhaps Washington justifies their inclusion on the grounds that creepiness is next to ghostliness.

What you do notice, sitting this next to The New Uncanny, is how uncomfortably the classical Anglo-Saxon ghost story sits with Freud's schema. Where Freud saw the intertwining of the familiar with the strange as heightening unease, our tradition turns that around, using the familiar to tame the strange, placing strict limits on how scary things can get. There is almost always a let-out – a narrator who may be unreliable, events explicable in scientific terms. If we need the uncanny – and I suspect we do – then we also need it updating, as Page, Eyre and their authors have tried. But, I have to say, the old uncanny strikes me as much more fun.

The New Uncanny available from Comma Press £7.95 (226pp) (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

Ghost Stories available from Everyman's library £10.99 (407pp) (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

PHANTOM PROMISES: GHOSTLY REVIVALS

The ghost story, a much-loved revenant, has begun to return more often. Susan Hill followed her evergreen chiller 'The Woman in Black' with a novella, 'The Man in the Picture'. Last year saw a crowd of spooky fictions that bow to their ancestors, notably from John Harwood ('The Séance'), James Wilson ('Consolation') and James Buchan ('The Gate of Air'). From Japan, the supernatural visits modern Tokyo in the novels of Taichi Yamada – such as 'I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While'.