The death of W.G. Sebald, in December 2001, could not help seeming both capricious and uncannily fated. Although he was 57 years old, Sebald – a German-born academic who spent most of his adult life in England – had not begun to write fiction until he was in middle age, and American readers had only known about him for a mere five years. From 1996 until 2001, all four of Sebald’s novels – “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn,” “Vertigo,” and “Austerlitz” – were translated in quick succession, giving the effect of a sudden windfall: Readers found themselves with a major new body of work to explore, and the promise of much more to come. But “Austerlitz” was to be Sebald’s last novel; he was killed in a car crash just months after its American publication.

The stunning sense of lost possibility could not have been greater if Sebald had been a prodigy in his 20s. At the same time, however, death had never been remote from the man and his work. Like his literary ancestors – Poe, Kafka, Bernhard, Borges – Sebald took a lugubrious pleasure in the contemplation of death, destruction, and decay. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” he wrote in “The Emigrants,” and he was eerily hospitable to this return: in his writing, Sebald is and wants to be haunted.

The power and surprisingly wide appeal of his work are owed to the subtle ambiguity in his conception of this “return.” For a German writing in the wake of World War II – Sebald was born in 1944, and often wrote of his childhood among the ruins of bombed-out Germany – a confrontation with the dead was inevitable. And the same is true, more broadly, for everyone born in the murderous 20th century. Sebald’s preoccupation with the waste and hidden casualties of history fits perfectly with a postmodern sensibility that found its emblem in Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, his face turned backward toward the ever-mounting ruins of the past.

Yet Sebald also, in delicate ways,suggests that the return of the dead is more than a metaphor, that he is haunted by history in a very literal sense. As the title character explains in “Austerlitz,” “I now think … that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it,and when I arrive I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously.” In all of his books – which are not really novels, but a kind of philosophical travel writing, with Sebald himself as narrator and guide – he is prone to visions, hallucinations, and premonitions, usually induced by a confrontation with a personal memory or a historical site.These are the source of the subdued horror of much of Sebald’s work, and also of its very dry humor. Talking about the Bavarian folk music he grew up with, for instance, Sebald says that it “has taken on in retrospect the character of something terrible which I know will pursue me to my grave” – a sentiment that is comic in its disproportion, yet also entirely serious.

This is one of many authentically Sebaldian moments to be found in “Campo Santo” (Random House, 224 pages, $24.95), a new collection of Sebald’s essays and miscellaneous prose.The title piece is one of four fragments of a literary work about a trip to Corsica, begun in the mid-1990s but soon abandoned. Even these few pieces of the Corsica book leave one regretting Sebald’s decision to put it aside in favor of “Austerlitz,” a more traditionally novelistic book. For these sketches have the virtues of Sebald’s best work, with its odd blend of fiction, memoir, history and travelogue.

The title piece of “Campo Santo” is a perfect introduction to Sebald’s hybrid art. Like “Vertigo,” parts of which recount a trip to Italy, and “The Rings of Saturn,” which describes a walking tour of eastern England, “Campo Santo” uses its Corsica setting as a launching pad for Sebald’s dark, tangled meditations.As he swims in the Bay of Ficajola, Sebald experiences one of his otherworldly epiphanies: “I sometimes felt as if the prospect towering so menacingly in front of me was not a part of the real world but the reproduction of a now insuperable inner faintness, turned inside out and shot through with blue-black markings.”

From here, it is a small step to a description of a local cemetery, which leads in turn to a disquisition on Corsican funeral customs. Characteristically, Sebald is drawn to the local belief in predatory ghosts,”the squadrons of the dead, increasing in numbers and strength year by year.” His own consciousness is full of ghosts only slightly more metaphorical: “And for some time, too,” he writes, “I have known that the more one has to bear, for whatever reason, of the burden of grief which is probably not imposed on the human species for nothing,the more often do we meet ghosts.”

Sebald’s Corsican sketches, alas, take up only a quarter of the book.They are certainly its highlight, along with a pair of brief, lovely memoirs, “Moments Musicaux” and “An Attempt at Restitution,” which return to the childhood sources of Sebald’s imagination. The rest of “Campo Santo” is devoted to literary essays and reviews, in which his sensibility is limited by the conventions of the form, the contours of the subject, and the heaviness of the prose. Anthea Bell, who beautifully translates Sebald’s German-romantic style, also faithfully reproduces his German-academic style: “Kluge’s way of providing his documentary material with vectors through his presentation of it transfers what he quotes into the context of our own present.”

Sebald’s criticism is most interesting when it is most ruthlessly subjective, finding in other writers – Handke, Kafka, Nabokov, Grass – just those scenes and themes that most resemble his own work. Certainly his description of Bruce Chatwin’s books could serve as a perfect motto for his own works, of which “Campo Santo” is likely to be the last: “their promiscuity, which breaks the mold of the modernist concept, [is] a late flowering of those early traveler’s tales, going back to Marco Polo, where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous.”