John P. O'Grady was born in New Jersey but graduated in forestry from the University of Maine. He is now associate professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

It is obvious, however, that one of the main strands of his interest lies in the occult, the paranormal, things that go bump in the night.

Grave goods - objects placed with the deceased at burial - represent a material and metaphorical bridge between life and the afterlife. In Grave Goods, O'Grady casts a wry philosophical eye on the whole business of spirits, psychics, superstitions, and occult phenomena, in the process inserting a number of wise interpolations and stripping away some of the more outlandish assumptions.

The tone throughout is one of amused forbearance. Always on the look-out for the bizarre, the peculiar and the just plain mad, O'Grady's imagination ranges with delighted fascination over ghost stories, macabre modern legends and metaphysical manifestations, while at the same time imparting extra dimensions by the feather-touch of his knowledge of the natural sciences.

For example, in an exquisitely written piece on the nature of trees, entitled 'A Tree Out There', he moves from the old custom of a tree being planted for good luck when a baby is born to including mentions of Walden, the redwoods of California in whose towering branches nestle the marbled murrelets, also known as the birds of heaven, the Salish people and their most powerful spiritual helper known as "Biggest Tree", the weeping face of the Virgin Mary seen in a tree in Salt Lake City, and Yggdrasil, the World Tree, which lies at the centre of Nordic mythology.

In the eponymous final essay, O'Grady writes of one Gus Kenny, a would-be philosopher, who moonlights as night-watchman in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco as it is relocated to another area. This piece allows our author to ruminate on the whole manner in which we view death, the dead, and the possibility of an afterlife. The graveyard disappears, young Gus goes off to war and never comes back, yet memories of him live on when his Big Book of Plato and his snatches of memoir are retrieved from one of the last crypts.

As an eerily amusing take on the natural world as a place of unnatural possibilities and strange beauty, these essays cannot be bettered. And O'Grady is a pure stylist where the written word is concerned. If you wish to treat yourself to something different in the sphere of literature, dear reader, then this is the volume for you.

Vincent Banville is a writer and critic

Grave Goods : Essays of a Peculiar Nature is available through Internet bookshops