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- Afhalen na 1 uur in een winkel met voorraad
- Gratis thuislevering in België vanaf € 30
- Ruim aanbod met 7 miljoen producten
Omschrijving
Prologue: The Veil Between Worlds
Volume 2 of Shadows Among the Living bears the title Human and Ghost — a phrase that captures the essential tension of the second hundred tales in this reimagining of Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi. While Volume 1 introduced readers to haunted temples, fox spirits, and the first stirrings of supernatural encounter, Volume 2 plunges deeper into the liminal space where the living and the dead touch, embrace, and sometimes tear each other apart.
This volume contains one hundred stories, each expanded from classical fragments into fully realized narratives. The unifying theme is the boundary between life and death — not as a fixed wall, but as a permeable membrane through which love, vengeance, memory, and unfinished business pass freely. Scholars meet ghosts who become wives. Murderers are haunted by their victims. The dead return to warn the living, to complete examinations, to care for aging parents, to reclaim lost honor.
But these are not simple ghost stories. In the world of Liaozhai, ghosts are not merely frightening specters. They are people — people who have died, yes, but people who retain their desires, their regrets, their hopes. They hunger for justice, for companionship, for a single moment of recognition. And the living who encounter them are transformed — not by fear, but by empathy, by love, by the sudden realization that death does not erase the soul.
This introduction offers a comprehensive overview of Volume 2's structure, major themes, and representative tales.
Conclusion: The Human and the Ghost
Volume 2 of Shadows Among the Living is a meditation on what it means to be human — and what it means to be a ghost. The boundary between the two is not a wall but a door, and the stories in this collection invite readers to step through that door, to see the dead not as monsters but as people, and to recognize that love, memory, and justice are stronger than death itself.
From the scholar who dies to join his ghost lover to the tiger who mourns at an old woman's grave, from the painted woman who steps out of a scroll to the cricket who fights for an emperor's amusement, these tales explore the full spectrum of human (and inhuman) experience. They are funny, tragic, romantic, and terrifying — sometimes all at once.
Volume 3 will continue the journey into the world of fox spirits and deception, where shape-shifters and tricksters test the boundaries of trust and identity.
End of Volume 2 Introduction
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