Great Horror Stories: Tales by Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft and Others

by Mike Ashley (Editor), John Grafton (Editor)

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." —H. P. Lovecraft

Fans of horror and the supernatural will savor the dark delicacies in this spine-tingling anthology of the genre's very best. Featuring an international gallery of the world's great horror writers, this collection celebrates one of literature's most popular forms of fiction with 14 masterfully crafted tales of terror, including:

Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast ; 
M.R. James - "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" ; 
William Hope Hodgson - The Derelict ; 
Saki (H.H. Munro) - Stedni Vashtar ; 
W.W. Jacobs - The Monkey's Paw ; 
Algernon Blackwood - The Willows ; 
Izumi Kyoka - A Tale of Three Who Were Blind ; 
Ambrose Bierce - The Damned Thing ; 
Arthur Machen - The White People ; 
Bram Stoker - Dacula's Guest ; 
Edgar Allan Poe - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar ; 
Shirley Jackson - The Lottery ; 
W.F. Harvey - The Beast With Five Fingers ; 
H.P. Lovecraft - The Colour Out of Space

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Gothic, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2008

About the author

Michael Raymond Donald Ashley is the author and editor of over sixty books that in total have sold over a million copies worldwide. He lives in Chatham, Kent.

Reviews

[Lelouch · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourites:
The derelict by William hope hodgson
Sredni vashtar by H H Munro
The Monkey's Paw by WW Jacobs
The lottery by Shirley Jackson

i didn't fully understand this story when i read it:
A tale of three who were blind by izumi kyoka

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I loved this anthology. These stories were written between 1850s-1950s, but they are still terror inducing! Below is a bit more of a breakdown of the stories….

“The Mark of the Beast” by Rudyard Kipling
I love Kipling’s text because I love their social commentary, this one specifically points out issues with arrogance, ignorance, and complete disrespect of the English colonizing India. This creepy little tale has layers upon layers of incredible subtext, but it also holds up as just a creepy creature tale alone.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to You, My Lad” by M. R. James
A fun antiquarian ghost story by the father of the genre.

“The Derelict” by William Hope Hodgson
Sea horror stories really terrify me! This one is a great environmental type horror story.

“Sredni Vashtar” by Saki ( H. H. Munro)
This story reads like a creation of a killer tale. Really a good story.

“The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs
I love this story! Read it as a child and it left such a huge impression on me that even now re-reading it all these years later it still causes shivers to run along my spine. People should always be careful what they wish for.

“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood
Blackwood is an amazing writer and deservedly so, “The Willows” is one of his most well known tales. Terrifying psychological tale. Blackwood creates such an atmosphere of fear it infects everyone.

“A Tale of Three Who Were Blind” by Izumi Kyōka
I found this particular ghost story very disturbing.

“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce
I really like Bierce, I don’t like this story as much as his others, but I had never read this one so that was a nice surprise. Overall a good little creature tale.

“The White People” by Arthur Machen
Very odd story…the frame and the diary read like two completely stories. The diary is very stream of consciousness (before that was even a writing style), and I personally didn’t care for it. I was more intrigued by the frame of the “teacher” and students. Definitely unsettling all around.

“Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker
So, I understand why they added this Stoker story, but unless you read Dracula, it’s not really that impressive. However, I have read Dracula and I loved this addition.

“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdmar” by Edgar Allen Poe
With all the great Poe tales out there I was shocked they picked this one. However I love it, this is a great medical science-fiction scare.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
I cannot praise this story enough. It has permeated American pop culture….if you read no other story from this anthology, READ THIS STORY! One of the greatest Americana gothic tales ever.

“The Beast with Five Fingers” by W. F. Harvey
Very creepy creature tale and has inspired so many movies and characters….however, the main characters are so dumb I almost feel they deserve everything they get!

“The Colour Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft
Another author with so many interesting short stories, but I throughly enjoyed this tale of terror! What is it? Who knows…

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb collection of short horror stories, most of which I have read (and enjoyed) before. They include as standbys as M. R. James's "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"; Saki's "Shredni Vashtar"; W. W. Jacobs's much anthologized "The Monkey's Paw"; Algernon Blackwood's great "The Willows"; Bram Stoker's "Dracula's Guest"; Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"; and H. P. Lovecrafts eldritch "The Colour Out of Space." Even among the stories I had no read before, there are some I will remember.

There are no tales of straightforward hauntings here. Rather, the evil comes from elementals and other inexplicable forces. The most classical of these is the Lovecraft, which tells of a meteor from outer space which led to strange lethal effects on the human, animal, and plant life in the area:

The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading—little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the color of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses—the few that are left in this motor age— grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of grayish dust.

They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.

This collection is great for Halloween reading, like others published by Dover.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good selection of horror stories. I had read a couple of them, which is not surprising for as many of these horror story anthologies as I have read, but most were new to me. There were a couple that started off a bit hard to follow due to the language used, but entertaining once I got into them. Overall, a solid collection of horror stories from top-notch writers.

[Googoogjoob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well and judiciously selected; this collection notably contains H P Lovecraft's two most-favorite horror stories ever (Blackwood's The Willows and Machen's The White People), as well as Lovecraft's favorite of his own stories (The Colour Out of Space), in addition to M R James's most beloved and acclaimed story ('Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'), two popular classics (Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw and Jackson's The Lottery), and representative works from Kipling, Hodgson, Saki, Bierce, Stoker, and Poe.

Almost all of the stories in this collection are great. In particular, The Willows, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad,' and The Colour Out of Space are all excellent, and hold up as well today as when they were written.

Surprisingly, given its reputation and the acclaim it's garnered, The White People was the only real dud in the book; I hadn't read it before, and was kind of shocked at how dull and un-creepy it was. It tries to do the thing of alluding to horrors without showing them: the story is dominated by a very very long run-on paragraph from the perspective of a young girl, as she naively and uncomprehendingly recounts a jumble of folktales and pagan rituals and practices that her nurse initiated her into. I kept waiting for something actually shocking or unusual to happen- but it never did, and then the story ended with a thud. The problem here, I suspect, is one of changed cultural perspectives. Shocking as some ideas in the story might have been at the time of publication, we now live in a world of Wiccans and neopagan reconstructionists, where voodoo dolls and zombies are pop culture commonplaces. It's simply not that scary or uncanny to imagine that witches or pagan cults might exist, or that young people might be initiated into them- they do exist, now, and they're almost totally out in the open, and pretty clearly harmless. This is a horror story for the sort of upright Victorian or Edwardian Christian who would've been scandalized to the core by The Golden Bough; today only the most intolerant and repressive fundamentalists would think it a good thing for a girl to kill herself to avoid becoming a pagan.

Otherwise wonderful.

[Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. My favorite story was "The Color Out of Space." My second favorite was "The Willows" and I can definitely see how H.P. Lovecraft was inspired by that one. I also really enjoyed "The Derelict." I like the atmosphere, mystery, and creature feature feel to these stories. I didn't understand "A Tale of Three Who Were Blind" or "The White People." Very intriguing and interesting premises, however, they left me confused, and not in a good way. Overall, I definitely recommend this collection, and will likely keep the physical copy of this book that I currently have just for "The Color Out of Space" alone; it's so good!

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

The worst intro to a book I've ever read.

As for the actual content, they are "classic" horror stories. Some of them have aged well, some not so much.

[Melissa Arenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice mix of short horror stories that range from monsters to vampires to ghosts. It is a nice mix of topics as well as lengths.

[Deda Sab · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were really good, while others were just meh.

[Peter Skeels · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book! I loved all of the stories and the diversity of the stories! Horror stories are super fun to read!

[Cody Baggerly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A eclectic collection of classic horror. From Lovecraft to Poe to Kyoka, each story fits into its own sub-genre. Although not all stories appealed to me, there is something for everyone.

[Neil Davies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite being almost put off reading the book by the snobbish and pompous introduction from Mike Ashley (Good and bad horror? Really? Well written and badly written yes, but to label whole styles of horror as 'bad' because they don't meet your self-created standards of 'literature'? I don't know who you are and, frankly, I don't care. You're wrong.) I am now reading the stories, many of which are, of course, classics by classic horror writers, some I'm very familiar with, others less so. Been good so far - you know, in the end I've got these stories in other collections and I'd rather read them there than in a book with such a nauseating introduction. Sorry but I give up.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good amalgamation of short stories by famous horror writers. I bought this mainly to see which writers I should explore in more depth. Highlights for me were: "The Derelict" by Hodgson, "The Willows" by Blackwood, "The Lottery" by Jackson, "The Monkey's Paw" by Jacobs, and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" by James.

[Ted Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best collection of older horror stories I've come across! I've found most older horror fiction kind of lackluster, if only because the original pieces have been copied and often improved upon so much in contemporary work.

But, in my opinion, all of THESE stories are eminently re-readable.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A horrible introduction but otherwise probably the best cheap anthology of haute Weird fiction w/ good if idiosyncratic selections from 3 of the big 4 (Blackwood, Machen, & James), Poe, Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Saki, Izumi, & Bierce

[Jihane · Rating 4 out of 5]

got to love the Dracula Story...

[Seth Augenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great, eclectic collection.