What do you think?
Rate this book
I mille volti del terrore. Le più belle storie scritte dai maestri della moderna narrativa horror
Morti misteriose, magie innominabili, case infestate, voci di defunti: queste e altre inquietanti fantasie orrorifiche affollano le macabre narrazioni create dall'immaginazione dei moderni maestri dell'horror e qui raccolte. Da "I figli del grano" di Stephen King ai testi di Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, Tanith Lee, Ramsey Campbell e tanti altri.
244 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 1978
4 people are currently reading
123 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 9, 2023
Un'antologia senza particolari tematiche unificanti: vengono presentati racconti orrorifici sugli argomenti più disparati e che spaziano anche verso ulteriori sottogeneri e il fantasy.
Come quasi sempre accade per le raccolte, il valore risulta abbastanza eterogeneo: a buoni o anche ottimi racconti si alternano storie ben più dimenticabili. In generale (a dispetto dell'altisonante sottotitolo italiano :P), un certo numero di storie risente ormai abbastanza pesantemente del tempo trascorso dalla prima pubblicazione (sono passati ormai più di 40 anni).
In definitiva, comunque una lettura divertente e di buon intrattenimento, ma che non presenta picchi eccezionali per quanto riguarda la storia della narrativa horror.
Quali racconti ho preferito? Il classico "I figli del grano" del solito King (che personalmente ho sempre reputato immensamente più portato per la narrativa breve, rispetto ai romanzi), l'inquietantissima e disturbante storia di Janet Fox e quella curiosa e "barocca" di William Scott Home. Oltre ad essi, spiccano a mio parere i due testi a cui meno si adatta l'etichetta di "horror": i dark fantasy di Karl Edward Wagner e della sempre eccellente Tanith Lee.
Se in un'antologia dell'orrore svettano in particolare i due racconti più spiccatamente fantasy, forse qualcosa che tocca c'è... ma tutto sommato ne è valsa comunque la pena.
Consiglio però il libro solo a completisti dell'orrore. O, al limite, suggerisco di spulciare solo alcuni racconti, a seconda delle personali attitudini!
I voti ai singoli racconti:
In fondo al giardino - David Compton ★★★1/2
Urlando per uscire - Janet Fox ★★★★
Kane il maledetto - Karl Edward Wagner ★★★★
Io sento il buio - Dennis Etchinson ★★1/2
La custode - Manly Wade Wellman ★★1/2
I signori dei cavalli - Lisa Tuttle ★1/2
Bianco inverno - Tanith Lee ★★★★1/2
Una ragnatela di vene pulsanti - William Scott Home ★★★★
Il colmo della fortuna - David Drake ★★★
I figli del grano - Stephen King ★★★★
Se arriva Damon - Charles L. Grant ★★★1/2
L'adescamento - Ramsey Campbell ★★
Ricordo di un amore - Michael Bishop ★1/2
La lunga, lunga strada - Russell Kirk ★★
Come quasi sempre accade per le raccolte, il valore risulta abbastanza eterogeneo: a buoni o anche ottimi racconti si alternano storie ben più dimenticabili. In generale (a dispetto dell'altisonante sottotitolo italiano :P), un certo numero di storie risente ormai abbastanza pesantemente del tempo trascorso dalla prima pubblicazione (sono passati ormai più di 40 anni).
In definitiva, comunque una lettura divertente e di buon intrattenimento, ma che non presenta picchi eccezionali per quanto riguarda la storia della narrativa horror.
Quali racconti ho preferito? Il classico "I figli del grano" del solito King (che personalmente ho sempre reputato immensamente più portato per la narrativa breve, rispetto ai romanzi), l'inquietantissima e disturbante storia di Janet Fox e quella curiosa e "barocca" di William Scott Home. Oltre ad essi, spiccano a mio parere i due testi a cui meno si adatta l'etichetta di "horror": i dark fantasy di Karl Edward Wagner e della sempre eccellente Tanith Lee.
Se in un'antologia dell'orrore svettano in particolare i due racconti più spiccatamente fantasy, forse qualcosa che tocca c'è... ma tutto sommato ne è valsa comunque la pena.
Consiglio però il libro solo a completisti dell'orrore. O, al limite, suggerisco di spulciare solo alcuni racconti, a seconda delle personali attitudini!
I voti ai singoli racconti:
In fondo al giardino - David Compton ★★★1/2
Urlando per uscire - Janet Fox ★★★★
Kane il maledetto - Karl Edward Wagner ★★★★
Io sento il buio - Dennis Etchinson ★★1/2
La custode - Manly Wade Wellman ★★1/2
I signori dei cavalli - Lisa Tuttle ★1/2
Bianco inverno - Tanith Lee ★★★★1/2
Una ragnatela di vene pulsanti - William Scott Home ★★★★
Il colmo della fortuna - David Drake ★★★
I figli del grano - Stephen King ★★★★
Se arriva Damon - Charles L. Grant ★★★1/2
L'adescamento - Ramsey Campbell ★★
Ricordo di un amore - Michael Bishop ★1/2
La lunga, lunga strada - Russell Kirk ★★
August 7, 2009
Gerald Page trots out 1978's YEAR'S BEST HORROR and while there's more of the usual, the quality is overall better this time, with fewer weaker stories and one or two absolute gems.
Weak stuff first. The book ends with Russell Kirk's "There's A Long, Long Trail A Winding" which was also picked to be in the cornerstone collection Dark Forces, years later. I wasn't a fan then and I'm not a fan now. Kirk, a noted Conservative scholar, almost always writes about GOOD and EVIL and, from a technical point of view, his writing is top notch but the subject matter just seems, eh, I don't know, can I say "old fashioned" or "hackneyed" and leave it at that? Did Kirk ever contend with troublesome events like the Vietnam War (which threw his much valued conservatism into a complicated light), or was he content to have criminal hobos repenting and finding absolution? I don't know. "A Cobweb Of Pulsing Veins" (that title lurid enough for you?) by William Scott Home is on the other ends of the stylistic spectrum - a huge throbbing slice of pulp - so that means a plot you've heard before (man is hired to rob grave by mysterious individual but the thing he eventually steals is Eeeeevil!) although this one has some odd twists (the last line is bizarre!). Unfortunately, Home also writes like the old pulp writers, which means he writes as if he's being paid a half a cent a word. This leads to a Byzantine and abstruse prose style replete with multifarious verbalizings that fritter away the conscientious reader's patience for eldritch and preternatural shenanigans. Whew! Manly Wade Wellman's "Ever The Faith Endures" is a charming if slight tale about a man who returns to England to trace his family's roots and discovers a distant cousin, a stately home and the true, terrible meaning of his family name.
What would a Gerald Page YEAR'S BEST HORROR be without a Charles L. Grant story? A little thinner, maybe? Actually, Grant turns in one of his solid stories here, the award winning "If Damon Comes" which is a nicely direct (for once) tale of "quiet horror" in which a man must deal with the supernatural repercussions of disappointing his now-dead son. Janet Fox's "Screaming To Get Out" is another one of those "bad people get what they deserve" stories, although the bad guy in this one, a brutalizer of women with low self-esteem, is suitably loathsome enough for the reader to relish his encounter with a quiet fat girl who's not all she seems. Michael Bishop's "Within The Walls Of Tyre" is an odd story about a baby and a strange revenge plot while David Drake's "Best of Luck" involves Vietnam, a lucky coin and a werewolf. Both are solid reads.
"Winter White" is Tanith Lee doing her usual dark fantasy, to good effect (as usual) as a barbarian king finds a strange whistle and calls up a snow-white woman, invisible to everyone but him, who just won't leave him alone, which drives him crazy... Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow" is another sword and sorcery fable of Kane, his famous "Conan as black magician" creation. Generally, I'm not a fan of this genre but Wagner is a great writer and this Kane story is a little more straightforward than last year's (while still pulling a deft narrative chronology trick) - it sketches the story of what it's like being Kane's mistress and what that means when you want to stop seeing him (psst, it ends badly!). Dennis Etchison's "I Can Hear The Dark" is a short meditation on the child of famous (and highly-strung) soap opera star who's afraid of the dark and what he finds up there at the top the stairs. Etchison is a tough writer for me - I need to give him more attention than I tend to - but this story was concise and evocative, more like something from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS than "horror", per se, but well done regardless.
And the top stories? Lisa Tuttle's "The Horse Lord" is a spooky story set in an old farmhouse out in the wilds of western upstate New York where the stable has been boarded up since a trainer was eaten alive by his horses over a hundred years ago. The ending is intense and terrifying and well worth a read - an evocative horror. "At The Bottom Of The Garden" by David Campton is another entry into a sub-sub-genre of horror, the "little kid whose parents don't listen to him" story (see "Thus, I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier) - in this case a little girl who has a new friend who can do things like fix her teeth and fix the neighbor boy's withered legs and might be able to fix her headaches as well, if the friend knew how heads worked. The parents aren't listening, sadly for them. A guy named Stephen King finally makes an appearance with the classic "Children Of The Corn" - forget those cheesy movies and return to this wonderfully concise and terrifying story, part Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", part THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME, part Midwestern Gothic. The town of Gatlin, out there baking in a sea of corn in the middle of Nebraska, is empty of everyone but children. And why is that? Finally, Ramsey Campbell turns in another spooky creep-fest in "Drawing In" as a man rents a vacation home in the country to recuperate from an accident, a home whose walls seem to be cracking, a home filled with furtive scurryings and strange, barely glimpsed hairy faces, a home of an absent arachnologist off gathering specimens in Europe. There are cupboards full of mounted spiders in glass cases and one particularly large box which is curiously...empty.
And that's it. Search out this collection if anything sounds particularly compelling. It's worth the investment.
Weak stuff first. The book ends with Russell Kirk's "There's A Long, Long Trail A Winding" which was also picked to be in the cornerstone collection Dark Forces, years later. I wasn't a fan then and I'm not a fan now. Kirk, a noted Conservative scholar, almost always writes about GOOD and EVIL and, from a technical point of view, his writing is top notch but the subject matter just seems, eh, I don't know, can I say "old fashioned" or "hackneyed" and leave it at that? Did Kirk ever contend with troublesome events like the Vietnam War (which threw his much valued conservatism into a complicated light), or was he content to have criminal hobos repenting and finding absolution? I don't know. "A Cobweb Of Pulsing Veins" (that title lurid enough for you?) by William Scott Home is on the other ends of the stylistic spectrum - a huge throbbing slice of pulp - so that means a plot you've heard before (man is hired to rob grave by mysterious individual but the thing he eventually steals is Eeeeevil!) although this one has some odd twists (the last line is bizarre!). Unfortunately, Home also writes like the old pulp writers, which means he writes as if he's being paid a half a cent a word. This leads to a Byzantine and abstruse prose style replete with multifarious verbalizings that fritter away the conscientious reader's patience for eldritch and preternatural shenanigans. Whew! Manly Wade Wellman's "Ever The Faith Endures" is a charming if slight tale about a man who returns to England to trace his family's roots and discovers a distant cousin, a stately home and the true, terrible meaning of his family name.
What would a Gerald Page YEAR'S BEST HORROR be without a Charles L. Grant story? A little thinner, maybe? Actually, Grant turns in one of his solid stories here, the award winning "If Damon Comes" which is a nicely direct (for once) tale of "quiet horror" in which a man must deal with the supernatural repercussions of disappointing his now-dead son. Janet Fox's "Screaming To Get Out" is another one of those "bad people get what they deserve" stories, although the bad guy in this one, a brutalizer of women with low self-esteem, is suitably loathsome enough for the reader to relish his encounter with a quiet fat girl who's not all she seems. Michael Bishop's "Within The Walls Of Tyre" is an odd story about a baby and a strange revenge plot while David Drake's "Best of Luck" involves Vietnam, a lucky coin and a werewolf. Both are solid reads.
"Winter White" is Tanith Lee doing her usual dark fantasy, to good effect (as usual) as a barbarian king finds a strange whistle and calls up a snow-white woman, invisible to everyone but him, who just won't leave him alone, which drives him crazy... Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow" is another sword and sorcery fable of Kane, his famous "Conan as black magician" creation. Generally, I'm not a fan of this genre but Wagner is a great writer and this Kane story is a little more straightforward than last year's (while still pulling a deft narrative chronology trick) - it sketches the story of what it's like being Kane's mistress and what that means when you want to stop seeing him (psst, it ends badly!). Dennis Etchison's "I Can Hear The Dark" is a short meditation on the child of famous (and highly-strung) soap opera star who's afraid of the dark and what he finds up there at the top the stairs. Etchison is a tough writer for me - I need to give him more attention than I tend to - but this story was concise and evocative, more like something from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS than "horror", per se, but well done regardless.
And the top stories? Lisa Tuttle's "The Horse Lord" is a spooky story set in an old farmhouse out in the wilds of western upstate New York where the stable has been boarded up since a trainer was eaten alive by his horses over a hundred years ago. The ending is intense and terrifying and well worth a read - an evocative horror. "At The Bottom Of The Garden" by David Campton is another entry into a sub-sub-genre of horror, the "little kid whose parents don't listen to him" story (see "Thus, I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier) - in this case a little girl who has a new friend who can do things like fix her teeth and fix the neighbor boy's withered legs and might be able to fix her headaches as well, if the friend knew how heads worked. The parents aren't listening, sadly for them. A guy named Stephen King finally makes an appearance with the classic "Children Of The Corn" - forget those cheesy movies and return to this wonderfully concise and terrifying story, part Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", part THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME, part Midwestern Gothic. The town of Gatlin, out there baking in a sea of corn in the middle of Nebraska, is empty of everyone but children. And why is that? Finally, Ramsey Campbell turns in another spooky creep-fest in "Drawing In" as a man rents a vacation home in the country to recuperate from an accident, a home whose walls seem to be cracking, a home filled with furtive scurryings and strange, barely glimpsed hairy faces, a home of an absent arachnologist off gathering specimens in Europe. There are cupboards full of mounted spiders in glass cases and one particularly large box which is curiously...empty.
And that's it. Search out this collection if anything sounds particularly compelling. It's worth the investment.
July 15, 2023
Yet another solid collection of 1970s horror short fiction curated by Gerald Page. Dare I say, a bit tepid as some of the longer entries are rooted in the sword & sorcery subgenre of supernatural tales, here highlighted by a solid Karl Edward Wagner entry, as well as one by Tanith Lee (Winter White). There's only so much you can digest when it comes to downward journeys featuring strapping, barbarous men haunted by spectral femme fatales aka lustful witches. The high points come from Lisa Tuttle's 'The Horse Lord', King's 'Children of the Corn' (which moves impeccably fast for a story with rather dull characterization), and Charles L. Grant's 'If Damon Comes Home', a classic ghost story set in his fog-misted CT town of Oxrun. Other tales pine and wither the grotesque, for instance, David Drake, who seems to always expose a brilliant seed of an idea, but halted in some pulpy brevity that makes most of his tales feel unfinished. Michael Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, and David Compton have a bit of nasty fun with their character's demises/just-desserts. All in all, solid, but not the best of the DAW series.
September 4, 2011
A fairly strong entry in the series with a number of good stories. The best ones were:
"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton. A young girl's "imaginary" friend has miraculous healing powers. Unfortunately, her distracted parents don't pay attention to their daughter with dreadful consequences.
"Screaming to Get Out" by Janet Fox. A scurrilous womanizer delights in humiliating the desperate women he seduces. One of his conquests, however, knows exactly who she is and is perfectly comfortable in her own skin.
"The Horse Lord" by Lisa Tuttle. When a family moves into a house on a cursed plot of ground, the children begin to act strangely.
"Children of the Corn" by Stephen King. Bickering couple find themselves lost in Nebraska corn country, where locals worship a god who lives in the corn fields.
Based on their work here and in other Year's Best Horror Stories volumes, I'd say Tuttle and Fox are two authors well worth looking for. King's "Children of the Corn" does have its flaws: there's an implausible exposition scene (finding and reviewing local birth records), and the main character doesn't really do anything. But King is always a master at building up suspense and the story threat. He can make even the most preposterous scenario seem real and riveting.
"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton. A young girl's "imaginary" friend has miraculous healing powers. Unfortunately, her distracted parents don't pay attention to their daughter with dreadful consequences.
"Screaming to Get Out" by Janet Fox. A scurrilous womanizer delights in humiliating the desperate women he seduces. One of his conquests, however, knows exactly who she is and is perfectly comfortable in her own skin.
"The Horse Lord" by Lisa Tuttle. When a family moves into a house on a cursed plot of ground, the children begin to act strangely.
"Children of the Corn" by Stephen King. Bickering couple find themselves lost in Nebraska corn country, where locals worship a god who lives in the corn fields.
Based on their work here and in other Year's Best Horror Stories volumes, I'd say Tuttle and Fox are two authors well worth looking for. King's "Children of the Corn" does have its flaws: there's an implausible exposition scene (finding and reviewing local birth records), and the main character doesn't really do anything. But King is always a master at building up suspense and the story threat. He can make even the most preposterous scenario seem real and riveting.
November 19, 2022
stelle: 3 1/2
Una raccolta antologica dove autori e autrici horror mostrano la loro bravura con questo genere.
Composta da 14 racconti, "I mille volti del terrore" si caratterizza per i diversi tipi di storie dell'orrore riportate: prettamente soprannaturali, alcune macabre e violente, altre dalla tensione crescente, mostrano elementi in grado di stuzzicare i lettori più disparati.
Ammetto che da una raccolta con un nome così altisonante mi sarei aspettata di più: tuttavia quando si parla di antologie, è qualcosa da mettere in conto.
In questo caso tuttavia mi sono trovata di fronte a storie che non sono riuscite a trasmettere emozioni particolari, se si escludono una leggera indignazione e qualche refolo di tensione.
L'unico racconto che mi abbia assolutamente convinto è stato "I figli del grano" di Stephen King: il mio amore per l'autore non è certo una novità, ma il suo nome non ha giocato un ruolo fondamentale nella scelta del racconto. Ricco di macabri rituali, antiche e dimenticate divinità, ragazzini inquietanti e una coppia destinata al divorzio, "I figli del grano" si caratterizza per la tensione crescente, brividi lunga la schiena e descrizioni che vi faranno credere di essere inseguiti all'interno di campi di grano.
Menzione d'onore viene consegnata a "La Custode" di Manly Wade Wellman e "Se arriva Damon" di Charles L. Grant
Se siete in vena di letture a tema Halloween e le antologie non vi spaventano, perché non provarla?
Una raccolta antologica dove autori e autrici horror mostrano la loro bravura con questo genere.
Composta da 14 racconti, "I mille volti del terrore" si caratterizza per i diversi tipi di storie dell'orrore riportate: prettamente soprannaturali, alcune macabre e violente, altre dalla tensione crescente, mostrano elementi in grado di stuzzicare i lettori più disparati.
Ammetto che da una raccolta con un nome così altisonante mi sarei aspettata di più: tuttavia quando si parla di antologie, è qualcosa da mettere in conto.
In questo caso tuttavia mi sono trovata di fronte a storie che non sono riuscite a trasmettere emozioni particolari, se si escludono una leggera indignazione e qualche refolo di tensione.
L'unico racconto che mi abbia assolutamente convinto è stato "I figli del grano" di Stephen King: il mio amore per l'autore non è certo una novità, ma il suo nome non ha giocato un ruolo fondamentale nella scelta del racconto. Ricco di macabri rituali, antiche e dimenticate divinità, ragazzini inquietanti e una coppia destinata al divorzio, "I figli del grano" si caratterizza per la tensione crescente, brividi lunga la schiena e descrizioni che vi faranno credere di essere inseguiti all'interno di campi di grano.
Menzione d'onore viene consegnata a "La Custode" di Manly Wade Wellman e "Se arriva Damon" di Charles L. Grant
Se siete in vena di letture a tema Halloween e le antologie non vi spaventano, perché non provarla?
December 29, 2021
Gerald Page had a real knack for picking excellent horror stories. This was his third edited horror anthology with DAW, and was the best one yet. Some of the best tales include Tanith Lee’s “Winter White” and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Undertow.” The most famous story is probably Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn,” though much better than the same named movie. Some are less scary, though still good, like Russell Kirk’s “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” and “Ever the Faith Endures” by Manley Wade Wellman.
Though from 1978, this anthology still delivers some chilling good reads.
Though from 1978, this anthology still delivers some chilling good reads.
Read
July 13, 2024"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton - wc
"Screaming to Get Out" by Janet Fox - wc
"A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins" by William Scott Home - wc
"Screaming to Get Out" by Janet Fox - wc
"A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins" by William Scott Home - wc
August 11, 2022
Unico racconto degno di nota “I figli del grano” di Stephen King. Sicuramente da 5 ⭐️
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews