Armada were quick to follow the success of The Armada Ghost Book with the publication of The 2nd Armada Ghost book the following year.
Christine Bernard retook the helm as the ghost story compiler, but her choices in this second volume suggest this book might have been a bit of a rush job. The clue to the kind of tales required for this book was surely in the title. But Bernard's collection of far-flung tales appears as though cribbed from a possible alternate venture, and hemmed within the Armada Ghost Book franchise as a quick cash-grab after the popularity of the first in the series.
Whether Bernard's selection really was a misunderstanding of her brief, or she was annoyed the change of book title had made her anthologising skills look questionable and so turned down the offer of the third book, the lack of ghosts within the pages of this second book in the franchise did not go unnoticed and a new editor took the helm of the series for the third Armada Ghost Book...
Gino D'Achille's 'running boy' motif artwork kept the franchise's visuals on point, with the cover art appearing to depict the lad racing from a ferocious bat borne from the fiery pits of hell itself. Only when the book is flipped over to read the advertising blurb does the reader realise the location is actually an ancient graveyard with subsiding tombstones, set beneath a stormy blood-coloured sunset.
