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Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
First published in 1944, here are fifty-two stories of heart-stopping suspense from some of the most renowned authors and horror writers in literary history, with an introduction and notes from Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise.
“There is not a story in this collection that does not have the breath of life, achieve the full suspension of disbelief that is so particularly important in [this] type of fiction.”—The Saturday Review
This spine-chilling anthology collects stories from such distinguished spell weavers like:
• Edgar Allan Poe (“The Black Cat”)
• Wilkie Collins (“A Terribly Strange Bed”)
• Henry James (“Sir Edmund Orme”)
• Guy de Maupassant (“Was It a Dream?”)
• O. Henry (“The Furnished Room”)
• Rudyard Kipling (“ ‘They’ ”)
• H. G. Wells (“Pollock and the Porroh Man”)
As well as tales from other masters of literature, including:
• Algernon Blackwood (“Ancient Sorceries”)
• Walter de la Mare (“Out of the Deep")
• E.M. Forster (“The Celestial Omnibus”)
• Isak Dinesen (“The Sailor-Boys Tale”)
• H.P. Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror”)
• Dorothy L. Sayers (“Suspicion”)
• Ernest Hemingway (“The Killers”)
• And more!
Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a gooseflesh special,” Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is a must-read for every horror fan and lover of classic literature.
“There is not a story in this collection that does not have the breath of life, achieve the full suspension of disbelief that is so particularly important in [this] type of fiction.”—The Saturday Review
This spine-chilling anthology collects stories from such distinguished spell weavers like:
• Edgar Allan Poe (“The Black Cat”)
• Wilkie Collins (“A Terribly Strange Bed”)
• Henry James (“Sir Edmund Orme”)
• Guy de Maupassant (“Was It a Dream?”)
• O. Henry (“The Furnished Room”)
• Rudyard Kipling (“ ‘They’ ”)
• H. G. Wells (“Pollock and the Porroh Man”)
As well as tales from other masters of literature, including:
• Algernon Blackwood (“Ancient Sorceries”)
• Walter de la Mare (“Out of the Deep")
• E.M. Forster (“The Celestial Omnibus”)
• Isak Dinesen (“The Sailor-Boys Tale”)
• H.P. Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror”)
• Dorothy L. Sayers (“Suspicion”)
• Ernest Hemingway (“The Killers”)
• And more!
Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a gooseflesh special,” Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is a must-read for every horror fan and lover of classic literature.
1056 pages, Hardcover
First published October 18, 1944
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3502 people want to read
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October 2, 2017
Why have only about 1,200 people added this one?
Folks, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is essential reading for any horror, suspense, thriller, or mystery fan. There are several stories in here that would, by themselves, would make the purchase price a steal. I could talk about the real shiners in this collection, but I'll instead rattle off some of the writers I encountered here for the first time back in my early twenties:
Algernon Blackwood
M.R. James
E.F. Benson
Oliver Onions
Saki
Arthur Machen
John Collier
Wilkie Collins
And these are just the ones that were previously unfamiliar to me. Add to that amazing list writers like Poe, Lovecraft, Hemingway, Faulkner...do I need to go on? Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is one of the finest collections of all time. Buy it now!
P.S. My very favorites are "The Great God Pan," "Casting the Runes," and "Confession."
Folks, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is essential reading for any horror, suspense, thriller, or mystery fan. There are several stories in here that would, by themselves, would make the purchase price a steal. I could talk about the real shiners in this collection, but I'll instead rattle off some of the writers I encountered here for the first time back in my early twenties:
Algernon Blackwood
M.R. James
E.F. Benson
Oliver Onions
Saki
Arthur Machen
John Collier
Wilkie Collins
And these are just the ones that were previously unfamiliar to me. Add to that amazing list writers like Poe, Lovecraft, Hemingway, Faulkner...do I need to go on? Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is one of the finest collections of all time. Buy it now!
P.S. My very favorites are "The Great God Pan," "Casting the Runes," and "Confession."
June 23, 2021
It was a dark and story night...
Classic anthology of horror stories first published in 1944. There is hardly a dull moment in the 52 tales collected here, which span 100 years from good old Balzac to that creep of creeps H.P. Lovecraft. Each reader will have his/her favourites, but the sheer range of theme and tone is stupendous for this type of anthology. I carried my Modern Library edition around with me for a month and now that I’m finished reading it I already miss the feel of its weight in my hands like that of a demonic newborn child. Easy boy, easy.
For a synopsis of each story I recommend this excellent review.
Here are my favourites, in no particular order:
— A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner (How far will you go to hold on to the one you love?)
— Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Falling in love with any plant, let alone a poisonous one, is a bad idea)
— Leiningen and the Ants by Carl Stephenson (World War III imagined as Man vs. Insect)
— Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad by M.R. James (Never blow into a random whistle my lad, never!)
— The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (Feeding Pagan Gods Strictly Forbidden)
— “They” by Rudyard Kipling (My god, how is it possible to write such exquisite prose?)
— Mrs Amsworth by E.F. Benson (When auntie wants your blood you run like hell)
Not all these stories are scary, but some of them will work you up to such a pitch of fear that the slightest noise will make you jump three feet in the air, guaranteed. How anyone can do that with words on a page is one of the great unsolved mysteries of this world.
Classic anthology of horror stories first published in 1944. There is hardly a dull moment in the 52 tales collected here, which span 100 years from good old Balzac to that creep of creeps H.P. Lovecraft. Each reader will have his/her favourites, but the sheer range of theme and tone is stupendous for this type of anthology. I carried my Modern Library edition around with me for a month and now that I’m finished reading it I already miss the feel of its weight in my hands like that of a demonic newborn child. Easy boy, easy.
For a synopsis of each story I recommend this excellent review.
Here are my favourites, in no particular order:
— A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner (How far will you go to hold on to the one you love?)
— Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Falling in love with any plant, let alone a poisonous one, is a bad idea)
— Leiningen and the Ants by Carl Stephenson (World War III imagined as Man vs. Insect)
— Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad by M.R. James (Never blow into a random whistle my lad, never!)
— The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (Feeding Pagan Gods Strictly Forbidden)
— “They” by Rudyard Kipling (My god, how is it possible to write such exquisite prose?)
— Mrs Amsworth by E.F. Benson (When auntie wants your blood you run like hell)
Not all these stories are scary, but some of them will work you up to such a pitch of fear that the slightest noise will make you jump three feet in the air, guaranteed. How anyone can do that with words on a page is one of the great unsolved mysteries of this world.
June 15, 2013
A previous reviewer called this collection a beast and they were right. This collection of terror/supernatural stories is over 1000 pages. I read the vast majority of them but I'll be honest, it one of them began to bore me or was just flat out bad, I would just cut my losses and move on. I had a long journey ahead of me and couldn't get hung up on duds.
It's a very strong collection of (relatively) short scary stories. As with all anthologies, there were some strong and some weak but the good definitely far outweighed the bad here.
That being said, if you do want to read this book you will need to start and stop it many times. I think I about 5 different novels while I was reading this. You can only read so many scary stories in a row before your mind rejects the input you're trying to give it. And so, without further ado, here are some highlights (and low lights) of this collection:
La Grande Breteche by Balzac: Classic cheated lover revenge tale. "The best tales are told at a certain hour."
The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe: Very enjoyable. Poe is the master of having an insane, murderous 1st person protagonist who speaks and acts as if their craziness is the most normal thing in the world. Poe justice at its best.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe: Meh. Poe clearly didn't understand hypnosis but was quite freaked out by it all the same.
A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins: The story starts out promising enough with a young man finding himself on a great lucky streak in a gambling house of ill repute but the ending leaves much to be desired. But I will grant the story this...it does contain a terribly strange bed so here's to truth in advertising.
The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy: A fantastic tale of a remote country party during a storm. The modern reader will see many of the twists coming but not all of them. Very disturbing. Very satisfying.
The Interruption by W.W. Jacobs: A man kills his wife and then his maid attempts to blackmail him over it. He attempts to even the score in a very dangerous way...
The Sea Raiders: KILLER OCTUPI!!!! SAVE YOURSELVES!!!
Sredni Vashtar by Saki: A fascinating tale! A young boy creates a fantasy world in which he worships his quasi-wild pet Ferret as a god. Truly unlike anything I've ever read. Incredibly dark and wonderful story.
Moonlight Sonata by Alexander Woollcott: This one felt like a camp fire story. Very brief but it has one of those great scary story endings. Would have liked to see this fleshed out.
Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken: Macabre story of a 12 year old boy becoming schizophrenic. The way the author writes the boy's thoughts make the story feel so real as the boy's life becomes increasingly less so. He is slowly transforming into...something/someone...different. "At whatever cost to himself, whatever pain to others..."
Suspicion by Dorothy L. Sayers: I read my first Sayers earlier this year. She's primarily known for her Lord Peter Wimsey stories. This is a great who-dun-it revolving around British cuisine, hired help, and some well placed poison. Good stuff.
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell: One of my favorite short stories growing up. A man is hunted on an island by a crazy General. A tense thriller that is a must read.
Leiningen Versus The Ants by Carl Stephenson: A fantastic man vs. nature horror story. A cocky plantation owner in South America thinks he can outwit a 20 mile long/wide swarm of man-eating ants. The amount of strategy and back and forth between he and the ants is every bit as engrossing as any military battle I've ever read about. This was honestly the movie "Zulu" but with ants. I wasn't surprised to find out this was made into a movie with Charlton Heston (which I now HAVE to see). A truly wonderful story and a highlight of the book.
The Gentleman from America by Michael Arlen: This one was EXTREMELY overwritten. Yeesh, 20 words where one would do. Also, it was clear that Michael Arlen has never even met an American and was definitely not able to write in the voice of an American. That being said, the set up was interesting...the classic spend a night in a haunted house story and I always like a story in which multiple characters are driven to madness but come on Arlen...write what you know, buddy!
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner: Man, after reading a story like this, I have to take back some of the mean things I said about Faulker after reading "The Sound and The Fury." (Some of the things, but not all of the things.) This was a great tale that shows how one unfortunate effect of "Southern Hospitality" is that it may inadvertently allow something dark and horrible to exist just below the surface...something that isn't confronted until it is too late. A great read. More like this and I'll stop using "Faulker" as an insult.
The Killers by Ernest Hemingway: I've read a lot of Hemingway over the years but nothing recently. It was good to be back, although I wouldn't really characterize this as "horror" or "terror." I suppose it is horrible knowing that organized crime exists and if such an organization decides to kill you, you're eventually going to die. A short, sad story in the classic Hemingway style.
Back for Christmas by John Collier: A dark, comedic piece. Another well worn trope: Husband kills wife and attempts to get away scot-free. Great ending with writing every bit as tense as it is funny.
Taboo by Geoffrey Household: A great werewolf story with a terrifically disturbing ending. I thought I saw the twist but I was way off and most satisfying of all, the author didn't cheat. All the information you need is right there in front of you the whole time. Good stuff.
The Haunters and the Haunted or The House and the Brain by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Creepy haunted house story with a suitably strange ending. Had a Shirley Jackson feel to it.
Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Evil botanist has a beautiful daughter with a deadly secret. (Spoiler alert: It has something to do with botany. Shh!) The only other work I've ever read by Hawthrone was, of course, The Scarlet Letter. I read this story (and that one for that matter) as one large sexually repressed metaphor. Man, was this guy repressed! He was the Stephanie Meyer of his day in that regard. Pretty decent story all around.
Green Tea by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: In the process of writing a religious book on metaphysics, a religious scholar focuses too much, and yes, drinks too much green tea, and begins to see a shadow spirit monkey with glowing red eyes that only he can see. Quite unsettling but I read this as more of a xenophobic metaphor than anything else. Reminded me of Lovecraft in that everyone were constantly going completely mad at the drop of a hat.
What was it? by Fitz-James O'Brien: Invisible demon monster! Everybody run!
Sir Edmund Orme by Henry James: The second work I've read by James (the first being "The Turn of the Screw") Holy crap, does this guy over right. The editor says this guy is the opposite of Hemminway's minimalist style and, uh, yeah, I totally agree. What's frustrating is this is an interesting story. A mysterious figure haunts a young lady and her suitor can only see it after he falls in love with her. Interesting stuff, but could have been much, much shorter.
The Horla or Modern Ghosts by Guy De Maupassant: This one was great. It was told in a journal style and appears at first to be another haunted house story but eventually shows itself to be much more. It asks a question frequently not asked in these type of stories, namely, if these horrible monsters really existed, why wouldn't they try and take over the world and if they decided to, could we stop them? Some great quotes in this one: "Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms."
"Still, it is very foolish to make merry on a set date, by Government decree. People are like a flock of sheep, now steadily patient, now in ferocious revolt. Say to it: "Amuse yourself," and it amuses itself. Say to it: "Go and fight with your neighbor," and it goes and fights. Say to it: "Vote for the Emperor," and it votes for the Emperor; then say to it: "Vote for the Republic," and it votes for the Republic.
Those who direct it are stupid, too; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, a course which can only be foolish, ineffective, and false, for the very reason that principles are ideas which are considered as certain and unchangeable, whereas in this world one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is deception."
Was it a dream? by Guy De Maupassant: I'm really digging on this author. It's like reading a horror story written by Oscar Wilde. This story is super short but levels the reader like a punch in the gut. A guy loses his girlfriend and after she has been buried, he spends the night in the graveyard. When the witching hour arrives, all the corpses rise from their graves and write their true epitaph on their own tombstones and let's just say the truth is less than flattering. The climax of the story is what is written on his beloved's and I'll be honest, it completely leveled me. Very effective and heartbreaking storytelling.
The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford: This may be the best name of any short story I've read since H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" (which is also included in this anthology). Super spooky story written as a conversation from the protagonist to his friend explaining the strange goings on at his house and the terrible curse he bears. This story is really an example of the slow boil. Crawford slowly walks you down the path and you don't realize how invested and terrified you are until it's too late. Great setting of tone and mood.
The Furnished Room by O. Henry: I'd never read any thing by O. Henry before. I mostly just knew there was a candy named that and not much else. This one was more sad than scary. Two star crossed lovers unknowingly share the same shabby furnished room and it ends in about the most downtrodden way you could imagine.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad by M.R. James: A very good story. Tourist finds a stranger whistle on the beach with an inscription that he can't read. The mystery of just what is going on here and the reveal is superbly done and terrifying.
Afterward by Edith Wharton: A young couple moves into a very old house that is said to be haunted. The catch is, you see a ghost and don't know until much later that it was, in fact, a ghost you saw. With this information, my radar was ready for any suspicious characters so I mostly guessed the ending but it was still a great story of spooky goings-on and justice done from beyond the grave.
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs: A classic that I (and I'm sure everybody else) read back in grade school. I almost skipped this one but am so glad I didn't. We all know the story...a family has a monkey's paw that grants 3 wishes but always in horrible ways that they can't anticipate. But I thought I had remembered the family being bad and "deserving" what they got. On the contrary, they seemed very sweet and innocent and that makes the horrible, bleak ending all the more devastating. If you haven't picked this one up since childhood, it's definitely work a second look.
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: This story was one of the big reasons I even picked up this collection. H.P. Lovecraft always referred to him as a major influence and after reading this I can definitely believe it. All the classic Lovecraft touches are there: Horrible things that cannot be described, fear of the unknown, knowledge of the ancient and/or unknown proving fatal or driving characters to madness, xenophobic undertones...you know, Lovecraft.
This story was magnificent and absolutely lived up to it's reputation as one of the scariest stories of all time. But it had more than scares, it had great characterization, dialogue and a complex and complicated structure that reminded me of a Tarantino movie. I honestly don't know whether I enjoyed it more for the beauty of the writing or for the deep psychological scares which stick with the reader long after the book has been placed back on the nightstand. High, high, recommend.
How Love Came to Professor Guildea by Robert Hichens: A great slow burn story. An unlikely friendship develops between a priest and a professor. They are a charming odd couple that is beautifully fleshed out with realistic dialogue and naturalistic pacing. We learn the professor doesn't want to love anyone or anything and would appreciate if the world treated him likewise. One night something takes a liking to our dear professor...something that won't take no for an answer for increasingly disturbing reasons. This story uses an interesting device I've never seen employed before: A parrot can see...something...something that no one else can see. The parrot begins to mimic the physical and verbal characteristics of this entity with very creepy results.
Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White: This one has a healthy dose of the dynamic duo often seen in turn of the century literature: Colonialism and Racism. Two of the most awkward "ism's" to read. If you can get past those, this is actually a fairly entertaining and short story about the search for African Pygmies...no, not those Pygmies...really, really tiny ones. Like, disturbingly tiny. This was has some Cronenbergian physical horror in the mix. Not for the squeamish.
Caterpillars by E.F. Benson: A story that suffers from hindsight. It begins with our protagonist noticing strange Caterpillars in strange places in a creepy mansion. The big twist is that these Caterpillars...cause cancer!!! Clearly written during that sweet spot of time after we discovered cancer but before we had the foggiest idea about what caused it. Laughable ending to an otherwise short and ominous tale.
Mrs. Amworth by E.F. Benson: Very good vampire story. No surprises to anyone who has ever read a story like this but there is something to be said for something done right. It hits every beat and doesn't disappoint. If you need a short story that encapsulates the essence of what a true vampire story is...you can't do better.
Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood: I really wanted to like this more than I did. I've read a few short stories by him before and was impressed. This one read like a much less subtle version of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." The protagonist randomly gets off a train in France and ends up (cats) in a strange village (they're all cats) where strange things begin happening (CATS! CATS! DO YOU GET THAT THEY ARE CAT PEOPLE YET!!!) It's honestly about that subtle. There are some good spots but not enough to justify the longer length.
Confession by Algernon Blackwood: A very interesting psychological tale. The main character begins the story wandering London in dense fog and is completely lost. We find out that he has shell shock from being in war and it's never clear how much of the fog is real and how much is in his head. Our guy ends up at a strange house, sees something he shouldn't and wanders back into the fog. But something has followed him...
The Celestial Omnibus by E.M. Forster: An interesting premise that ends disappointingly. A small dark alley has a mysterious handmade sign saying "To Heaven." Our protagonist is a little boy who goes exploring and finds an old Omnibus (horse drawn carriage) that promises to take him to a distant land but warns he must buy his return ticket now or else he can't come back. It's all suitably creepy but the payoff doesn't deliver. I say we just have Stephen King re-write an ending.
The Ghost Ship by Richard Middleton: A funny little tale about a small English village who is overrun with ghosts precisely because they don't mind having them about. Enjoyable and silly. The lightness of the tale stands in stark contrast to the fact that the author later committed suicide. Overrun with ghosts indeed...
The collection finishes out with a one-two punch of H.P. Lovecraft: "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror." These are two of my all time favorite Lovecraft stories and I've previously reviewed them.
Well, if you've managed to read this whole review, you see what I mean about this collection being a beast. However, it's well worth the effort but by all means you must be patient and don't try to read everything all at once. So just remember, inside horror stories, you sprint. When reading a huge collection of them, you jog and take many breaks.
It's a very strong collection of (relatively) short scary stories. As with all anthologies, there were some strong and some weak but the good definitely far outweighed the bad here.
That being said, if you do want to read this book you will need to start and stop it many times. I think I about 5 different novels while I was reading this. You can only read so many scary stories in a row before your mind rejects the input you're trying to give it. And so, without further ado, here are some highlights (and low lights) of this collection:
La Grande Breteche by Balzac: Classic cheated lover revenge tale. "The best tales are told at a certain hour."
The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe: Very enjoyable. Poe is the master of having an insane, murderous 1st person protagonist who speaks and acts as if their craziness is the most normal thing in the world. Poe justice at its best.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe: Meh. Poe clearly didn't understand hypnosis but was quite freaked out by it all the same.
A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins: The story starts out promising enough with a young man finding himself on a great lucky streak in a gambling house of ill repute but the ending leaves much to be desired. But I will grant the story this...it does contain a terribly strange bed so here's to truth in advertising.
The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy: A fantastic tale of a remote country party during a storm. The modern reader will see many of the twists coming but not all of them. Very disturbing. Very satisfying.
The Interruption by W.W. Jacobs: A man kills his wife and then his maid attempts to blackmail him over it. He attempts to even the score in a very dangerous way...
The Sea Raiders: KILLER OCTUPI!!!! SAVE YOURSELVES!!!
Sredni Vashtar by Saki: A fascinating tale! A young boy creates a fantasy world in which he worships his quasi-wild pet Ferret as a god. Truly unlike anything I've ever read. Incredibly dark and wonderful story.
Moonlight Sonata by Alexander Woollcott: This one felt like a camp fire story. Very brief but it has one of those great scary story endings. Would have liked to see this fleshed out.
Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken: Macabre story of a 12 year old boy becoming schizophrenic. The way the author writes the boy's thoughts make the story feel so real as the boy's life becomes increasingly less so. He is slowly transforming into...something/someone...different. "At whatever cost to himself, whatever pain to others..."
Suspicion by Dorothy L. Sayers: I read my first Sayers earlier this year. She's primarily known for her Lord Peter Wimsey stories. This is a great who-dun-it revolving around British cuisine, hired help, and some well placed poison. Good stuff.
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell: One of my favorite short stories growing up. A man is hunted on an island by a crazy General. A tense thriller that is a must read.
Leiningen Versus The Ants by Carl Stephenson: A fantastic man vs. nature horror story. A cocky plantation owner in South America thinks he can outwit a 20 mile long/wide swarm of man-eating ants. The amount of strategy and back and forth between he and the ants is every bit as engrossing as any military battle I've ever read about. This was honestly the movie "Zulu" but with ants. I wasn't surprised to find out this was made into a movie with Charlton Heston (which I now HAVE to see). A truly wonderful story and a highlight of the book.
The Gentleman from America by Michael Arlen: This one was EXTREMELY overwritten. Yeesh, 20 words where one would do. Also, it was clear that Michael Arlen has never even met an American and was definitely not able to write in the voice of an American. That being said, the set up was interesting...the classic spend a night in a haunted house story and I always like a story in which multiple characters are driven to madness but come on Arlen...write what you know, buddy!
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner: Man, after reading a story like this, I have to take back some of the mean things I said about Faulker after reading "The Sound and The Fury." (Some of the things, but not all of the things.) This was a great tale that shows how one unfortunate effect of "Southern Hospitality" is that it may inadvertently allow something dark and horrible to exist just below the surface...something that isn't confronted until it is too late. A great read. More like this and I'll stop using "Faulker" as an insult.
The Killers by Ernest Hemingway: I've read a lot of Hemingway over the years but nothing recently. It was good to be back, although I wouldn't really characterize this as "horror" or "terror." I suppose it is horrible knowing that organized crime exists and if such an organization decides to kill you, you're eventually going to die. A short, sad story in the classic Hemingway style.
Back for Christmas by John Collier: A dark, comedic piece. Another well worn trope: Husband kills wife and attempts to get away scot-free. Great ending with writing every bit as tense as it is funny.
Taboo by Geoffrey Household: A great werewolf story with a terrifically disturbing ending. I thought I saw the twist but I was way off and most satisfying of all, the author didn't cheat. All the information you need is right there in front of you the whole time. Good stuff.
The Haunters and the Haunted or The House and the Brain by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Creepy haunted house story with a suitably strange ending. Had a Shirley Jackson feel to it.
Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Evil botanist has a beautiful daughter with a deadly secret. (Spoiler alert: It has something to do with botany. Shh!) The only other work I've ever read by Hawthrone was, of course, The Scarlet Letter. I read this story (and that one for that matter) as one large sexually repressed metaphor. Man, was this guy repressed! He was the Stephanie Meyer of his day in that regard. Pretty decent story all around.
Green Tea by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: In the process of writing a religious book on metaphysics, a religious scholar focuses too much, and yes, drinks too much green tea, and begins to see a shadow spirit monkey with glowing red eyes that only he can see. Quite unsettling but I read this as more of a xenophobic metaphor than anything else. Reminded me of Lovecraft in that everyone were constantly going completely mad at the drop of a hat.
What was it? by Fitz-James O'Brien: Invisible demon monster! Everybody run!
Sir Edmund Orme by Henry James: The second work I've read by James (the first being "The Turn of the Screw") Holy crap, does this guy over right. The editor says this guy is the opposite of Hemminway's minimalist style and, uh, yeah, I totally agree. What's frustrating is this is an interesting story. A mysterious figure haunts a young lady and her suitor can only see it after he falls in love with her. Interesting stuff, but could have been much, much shorter.
The Horla or Modern Ghosts by Guy De Maupassant: This one was great. It was told in a journal style and appears at first to be another haunted house story but eventually shows itself to be much more. It asks a question frequently not asked in these type of stories, namely, if these horrible monsters really existed, why wouldn't they try and take over the world and if they decided to, could we stop them? Some great quotes in this one: "Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms."
"Still, it is very foolish to make merry on a set date, by Government decree. People are like a flock of sheep, now steadily patient, now in ferocious revolt. Say to it: "Amuse yourself," and it amuses itself. Say to it: "Go and fight with your neighbor," and it goes and fights. Say to it: "Vote for the Emperor," and it votes for the Emperor; then say to it: "Vote for the Republic," and it votes for the Republic.
Those who direct it are stupid, too; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, a course which can only be foolish, ineffective, and false, for the very reason that principles are ideas which are considered as certain and unchangeable, whereas in this world one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is deception."
Was it a dream? by Guy De Maupassant: I'm really digging on this author. It's like reading a horror story written by Oscar Wilde. This story is super short but levels the reader like a punch in the gut. A guy loses his girlfriend and after she has been buried, he spends the night in the graveyard. When the witching hour arrives, all the corpses rise from their graves and write their true epitaph on their own tombstones and let's just say the truth is less than flattering. The climax of the story is what is written on his beloved's and I'll be honest, it completely leveled me. Very effective and heartbreaking storytelling.
The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford: This may be the best name of any short story I've read since H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" (which is also included in this anthology). Super spooky story written as a conversation from the protagonist to his friend explaining the strange goings on at his house and the terrible curse he bears. This story is really an example of the slow boil. Crawford slowly walks you down the path and you don't realize how invested and terrified you are until it's too late. Great setting of tone and mood.
The Furnished Room by O. Henry: I'd never read any thing by O. Henry before. I mostly just knew there was a candy named that and not much else. This one was more sad than scary. Two star crossed lovers unknowingly share the same shabby furnished room and it ends in about the most downtrodden way you could imagine.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad by M.R. James: A very good story. Tourist finds a stranger whistle on the beach with an inscription that he can't read. The mystery of just what is going on here and the reveal is superbly done and terrifying.
Afterward by Edith Wharton: A young couple moves into a very old house that is said to be haunted. The catch is, you see a ghost and don't know until much later that it was, in fact, a ghost you saw. With this information, my radar was ready for any suspicious characters so I mostly guessed the ending but it was still a great story of spooky goings-on and justice done from beyond the grave.
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs: A classic that I (and I'm sure everybody else) read back in grade school. I almost skipped this one but am so glad I didn't. We all know the story...a family has a monkey's paw that grants 3 wishes but always in horrible ways that they can't anticipate. But I thought I had remembered the family being bad and "deserving" what they got. On the contrary, they seemed very sweet and innocent and that makes the horrible, bleak ending all the more devastating. If you haven't picked this one up since childhood, it's definitely work a second look.
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: This story was one of the big reasons I even picked up this collection. H.P. Lovecraft always referred to him as a major influence and after reading this I can definitely believe it. All the classic Lovecraft touches are there: Horrible things that cannot be described, fear of the unknown, knowledge of the ancient and/or unknown proving fatal or driving characters to madness, xenophobic undertones...you know, Lovecraft.
This story was magnificent and absolutely lived up to it's reputation as one of the scariest stories of all time. But it had more than scares, it had great characterization, dialogue and a complex and complicated structure that reminded me of a Tarantino movie. I honestly don't know whether I enjoyed it more for the beauty of the writing or for the deep psychological scares which stick with the reader long after the book has been placed back on the nightstand. High, high, recommend.
How Love Came to Professor Guildea by Robert Hichens: A great slow burn story. An unlikely friendship develops between a priest and a professor. They are a charming odd couple that is beautifully fleshed out with realistic dialogue and naturalistic pacing. We learn the professor doesn't want to love anyone or anything and would appreciate if the world treated him likewise. One night something takes a liking to our dear professor...something that won't take no for an answer for increasingly disturbing reasons. This story uses an interesting device I've never seen employed before: A parrot can see...something...something that no one else can see. The parrot begins to mimic the physical and verbal characteristics of this entity with very creepy results.
Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White: This one has a healthy dose of the dynamic duo often seen in turn of the century literature: Colonialism and Racism. Two of the most awkward "ism's" to read. If you can get past those, this is actually a fairly entertaining and short story about the search for African Pygmies...no, not those Pygmies...really, really tiny ones. Like, disturbingly tiny. This was has some Cronenbergian physical horror in the mix. Not for the squeamish.
Caterpillars by E.F. Benson: A story that suffers from hindsight. It begins with our protagonist noticing strange Caterpillars in strange places in a creepy mansion. The big twist is that these Caterpillars...cause cancer!!! Clearly written during that sweet spot of time after we discovered cancer but before we had the foggiest idea about what caused it. Laughable ending to an otherwise short and ominous tale.
Mrs. Amworth by E.F. Benson: Very good vampire story. No surprises to anyone who has ever read a story like this but there is something to be said for something done right. It hits every beat and doesn't disappoint. If you need a short story that encapsulates the essence of what a true vampire story is...you can't do better.
Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood: I really wanted to like this more than I did. I've read a few short stories by him before and was impressed. This one read like a much less subtle version of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." The protagonist randomly gets off a train in France and ends up (cats) in a strange village (they're all cats) where strange things begin happening (CATS! CATS! DO YOU GET THAT THEY ARE CAT PEOPLE YET!!!) It's honestly about that subtle. There are some good spots but not enough to justify the longer length.
Confession by Algernon Blackwood: A very interesting psychological tale. The main character begins the story wandering London in dense fog and is completely lost. We find out that he has shell shock from being in war and it's never clear how much of the fog is real and how much is in his head. Our guy ends up at a strange house, sees something he shouldn't and wanders back into the fog. But something has followed him...
The Celestial Omnibus by E.M. Forster: An interesting premise that ends disappointingly. A small dark alley has a mysterious handmade sign saying "To Heaven." Our protagonist is a little boy who goes exploring and finds an old Omnibus (horse drawn carriage) that promises to take him to a distant land but warns he must buy his return ticket now or else he can't come back. It's all suitably creepy but the payoff doesn't deliver. I say we just have Stephen King re-write an ending.
The Ghost Ship by Richard Middleton: A funny little tale about a small English village who is overrun with ghosts precisely because they don't mind having them about. Enjoyable and silly. The lightness of the tale stands in stark contrast to the fact that the author later committed suicide. Overrun with ghosts indeed...
The collection finishes out with a one-two punch of H.P. Lovecraft: "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror." These are two of my all time favorite Lovecraft stories and I've previously reviewed them.
Well, if you've managed to read this whole review, you see what I mean about this collection being a beast. However, it's well worth the effort but by all means you must be patient and don't try to read everything all at once. So just remember, inside horror stories, you sprint. When reading a huge collection of them, you jog and take many breaks.
September 24, 2015
I first read this book years ago, but I've since read through the majority of the stories several times each. A great collection--the old-time, atmospheric tales are my personal favorites!! A great book to have on your shelves. :)
January 30, 2019
This anthology was my favorite book of all time from the age of 10 until the age of 12. I spent the weekend re-reading it. There are many favorite stories here that almost everyone has heard of and read: The Most Dangerous Game, Leiningen Versus the Ants, Shredni Vashtar, The Open Window, The Monkey's Paw.. Many here are still widely read because they were anthologized here first.
For the most part the stories still thrilled me. Even so I could not get over how many of them used the framing device of a bunch of white Englishmen at the club who are just lighting their cigars and settling down to hear one man's hair-raising yarn...or something very close to it. A few are culturally offensive, relying on witch-doctor tropes and colonial points of view that jar, but mostly their frame of reference is stiff-upper-lippish, rather than unreadably inappropriate. I still love them all albeit nostalgically at times rather than for their currency.
For the most part the stories still thrilled me. Even so I could not get over how many of them used the framing device of a bunch of white Englishmen at the club who are just lighting their cigars and settling down to hear one man's hair-raising yarn...or something very close to it. A few are culturally offensive, relying on witch-doctor tropes and colonial points of view that jar, but mostly their frame of reference is stiff-upper-lippish, rather than unreadably inappropriate. I still love them all albeit nostalgically at times rather than for their currency.
July 28, 2008
I actually have an original, 1944 edition that was passed down to me by my father when I was just entering into my teens. Many of the great classic authors grace these pages, from Faulkner, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Dickens, and Forster to Poe, Wells, and Kipling, among many others. My only disappointment is that I can no longer read through the book without worrying that I will break the binding! Perhaps I should be looking for a newer copy...
Want to read
July 12, 2020This came up when I was searching A.E. Coppard, who was mentioned by T.E.D. Klein, and whom I don't recall having read (although s/he is listed in several collections of this sort, so I may well have encountered a story or two somewhere).
February 21, 2022
So, this came up in my to-read list and, yes, I do not actually own a copy of this classic collection. I've got my The Dark Descent and my Dark Forces and my Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature and Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic and the recent, very nice American Fantastic Tales Boxed Set. Heck, I've even got a first edition of Summers' The Supernatural Omnibus (and I'm not a book collector in that way at all). This is one of those cornerstone anthologies and it's possible that if I ran across it in a used book store I may have declined a purchase simply due to the fact that I've read and own a copy of almost everything in it.
There's a nicely succinct introduction that lays out the basic structure of the collection - the first half is Tales Of Terror (that is to say, "naturalistic"), the second is Tales Of The Supernatural (self-explanatory). I'll have to say that the "terror tale" first section seems to me to be a more muddled definitional slough than the second "supernatural" one - how does one distinguish mystery from crime from conte cruel, for example? I know how *I* distinguish them, but lumping all these types into a "terror" category seems a bit of a hard swallow. Still, this is a classic volume and deserves to be on any fans' shelf simply for the vast variety and opportunity it contains. Contrary to my usual approach, since these are all familiar "classics", I'll put the reviews in the order they appear in the book, instead of ranked by my opinion.
In "The Mysterious Mansion" by Honoré de Balzac, a man discovers the story behind a grand manor, now abandoned, and an act of horrific cruelty perpetrated by a husband on his unfaithful wife. A solid, old-style conte cruel - told in a fable-like, straight-ahead fashion.
There's "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe, wherein a drunkard relates how his brutal crime originated. I tend not to do in-depth reviews of classics, as they've already been picked over by much stronger minds than mine. But what strikes me about this story is that while "The Telltale Heart" may earn its status as a compact horror masterpiece, "The Pit & The Pendulum" completely nails its suspense scenario (even with an abrupt, albeit justified, ending), and "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" lives up to its Gothic symbolism, "The Black Cat" tends to get short shrift (if for nothing else the near replication of the climax of "Heart", although here the suspense is externalized, not internal) - and that overlook is undeserved. I like how it is unreliable (told to us by an alcoholic prone to fits of violent anger, attempting to justify himself), dry in its recitation of the facts (with occasional moments of dramatic "fits") and especially how the wife/victim - subject of physical abuse - slowly takes on the better characteristics of both the narrator (his supposed loving nature towards animals) and the cat/s. Great stuff, without an ounce of literary fat.
Meanwhile, in "A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins, a man wins big at a disreputable casino and then, overcome by drink (or something more?) agrees to spend the night in a room upstairs, a room with a very strange bed. Nice little bit of suspense writing which I am now old enough to re-appreciate (having dismissed it during my pretentious, middle-aged, "horror is important and deep and needs to have meaning" phase). I particularly liked the bit where some moonlight through a window triggers an unexpected and forgotten memory in our narrator.
Thomas Hardy's "The Three Strangers" is less of a "terror tale" and more of an ironic suspense story, while also having the feel of a local legend or bit of folklore. Three strangers turn up at an isolated homestead on a stormy night when the farmer is celebrating the christening of his daughter... but this is not a religious allegory at all, and the tale turns on identification and mis-identification. I enjoyed it for the authentic and interesting portrayal of rural gatherings and the accepted rules of social etiquette of the time, but less as a supposed "scary" story.
The famed author of "The Monkey's Paw" (hands down one of the greatest scare stories ever written - and if you think you're too familiar with it to find it effective, go ahead a re-read it sometime soon. It's a masterpiece), W.W. Jacobs, only had fair-to-middling success with his other tales (although I did like "The Well", which I reviewed in Ghost Stories). Here we are given his piece "The Interruption", which is a tightly written tale in which a man succeeds at murdering his wife, only to realize that the overlooked housemaid now has much more power in the household. I dug it - like something from a later Alfred Hitchcock anthology.
"Pollock And The Porroh Man" is an H.G. Wells story that's long been on my "to be read" lists and, having now read it, I can see why. The "white man stumbles against tribal magic" story trope may be old hat by now (see also Kipling's "Mark Of The Beast", White's "Lukundoo", and endless pulp and EC comics stories, etc. etc.) but Wells does an amazing job here making it very exciting indeed. This is one of my favorite stories here, as a British soldier is cursed by a tribal witch doctor and takes a nightmare plunge down into the classic scenario of flight, terror, rationalizing and anthropological reinforcement. It's brilliantly handled (Wells has such a great touch for detail like the character and dialogue of the Portuguese Jew, Perea, or the initial "upside-down" look the witch-doctors casts backwards at the soldier, and how it resonates throughout the tale) and thoroughly entertaining and I wonder why no one has even made a short film of it (it's a very *visual* tale) - at least as far as I know of. Its placement in the book is an interesting and valid choice as well - and what a last line!
Wells appears again with "The Sea Raiders", a monster story in which he mixes a number of writing styles - scholarly science, journalistic distance and snappy, realistic action all feature in this recounting of mankind's first encounters with an aggressive new breed of cephalopod. Fun stuff.
As might be expected, H.H. Munro (Saki) is represented by his classic "Sredni Vashtar" - and who couldn't relish this lean, compact, nasty tale of childhood paganism and the usurping of adult control (Conradin's secret world of animal gods strikes me as having something of an air of chaos magick about it).
"Moonlight Sonata" by Alexander Woolcott is a droll little macabre piece in which a man, visiting a friend's estate and finding him absent, spends the night - only to spy a ghost near his door, quietly embroidering. But as it turns out, it isn't a ghost and that isn't what it is doing. I upgraded this a bit on the reread but not by much. I appreciated its drollness a bit more now, and its attempt to sell the story as true, but still it seems a bit of macabre slumming.
Conrad Aiken's "Mr. Arcularis" is a personal favorite of mine but I've never read his justifiably acclaimed "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" until encountering it here (although I do remember the adaptation of it on Rod Serling's NIGHT GALLERY, narrated by Orson Welles). A deceptively simple story (in his mind a young boy begins to withdraw from the world behind an imaginary layer of snowfall) that has been widely interpreted (analogies of sensitivity, creativity, escapism, adolescence, even deafness) but I believe the introduction to the story gives the most likely reading - the onset of mental illness (possibly schizophrenia or autism) or obsession in a young mind, the drawing further and further away from the real world and deeper and deeper into imagination, the fascination with repetition and a calm, controllable environment. It's a fascinating, at times lyrical piece.
A proper British businessman lives his punctual life - caring for his nervously afflicted wife, tending his garden, putting in hours at work, hiring a new cook, reading the hubbub in the news about an arsenic-poisoner on the loose - until he begins to suffer odd stomach pains in Dorothy L. Sayers "Suspicion". This is a fun read - in a way, it's using the suspense approach to play against the expected stiff-upper-lip, mustn't-jump-to-conclusions, stolid Englishman, really tightening down the screws as you sit there thinking "c'mon, man!". The last line is excellent.
Everyone by now knows Richard Connell' s "The Most Dangerous Game" - guys falls off a yacht, swims to Caribbean island owned by a Russian General who enjoys big-game hunting but who has become bored with the endeavor until he discovered new prey to hunt. What's impressive on rereading this is how lean and carved down this adventure/suspense story is - it knows the story it wants to tell and proceeds to tell it, with little to no adornment or wasted verbiage. And that ending is quite nicely pulled off as well. Still a solid story. PLEASE SEE our free reading at PSEUDOPOD.
In "The Gentleman From America" by Michael Arlen two well off Britishers bet the titular character that, for 500£, he cannot sleep overnight in the haunted room. He attempts it, only to eventually face-off against a terrifying apparition. Fast forward a number of years, when the 3 men are reunited and truths are told...This is an odd and interesting little story - not perhaps the story itself, exactly (which seems to owe quite a bit to Ambrose Bierce's "A Watcher By The Dead"), but the disparate parts - the set up is classic (daring to stay in a notorious haunted room - see "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells for one example), while the tone is humorous (if not fully comic) with the stiff Brits playing off the optimistic and blunt American caricature. Then, there's a story within the story ("The Phantom Footsteps") as the American settles down to read a children's book of ghost stories that has been left by the bed. The apparition is strikingly described (headless, with longer and longer arms!) - and then there's the flash forward, which puts everything in a frame (while not, it seems, intending to imply a humorous cast to the later events). Neat.
In "A Rose For Emily" by William Faulkner, a reclusive, aged scion of a gentile Southern town finally dies, and we are treated to a tour through her conflicted history with the townspeople, even as a locked room in her mansion reveals a final surprise. A solid Southern Gothic, short and pithy, sketching out the trapped situation that the moneyed classes, and especially unmarried women, found themselves in in the Old South.
Next up is Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" - a stripped-down noir piece (without the hysterical trappings of, say, Cornell Woolrich) that has echoes forwards in time to, for example, Cronenberg's film A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. We get a simple setting (a small town diner) and two threatening thugs come to deliver a message. It's all clipped, small phrases and repetition (because it's Hemingway) and some "realistic to the time" racial epithets, but the best part of it (outside of the thug's mannerisms) is that the target of the threat, when finally warned, is resigned to his fate. In that, it's very much like Woolrich, the unknown and unknowable human machinations of fate that grind away behind the facade of society, waiting to chew up people who step over lines.
"Back For Christmas" - by another personal favorite writer, John Collier, is familiar to me as it was adapted a number of times on old radio dramas (SUSPENSE, etc.). That's understandable as it's a slick, whittled down murder story - not a mystery or even much of a crime story but, like the Jacobs piece earlier, more in the line of an ironic ending ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS episode - not a "whodunnit" but a "willhegetawaywithit?" Another slight but fun read.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS 1
There's a nicely succinct introduction that lays out the basic structure of the collection - the first half is Tales Of Terror (that is to say, "naturalistic"), the second is Tales Of The Supernatural (self-explanatory). I'll have to say that the "terror tale" first section seems to me to be a more muddled definitional slough than the second "supernatural" one - how does one distinguish mystery from crime from conte cruel, for example? I know how *I* distinguish them, but lumping all these types into a "terror" category seems a bit of a hard swallow. Still, this is a classic volume and deserves to be on any fans' shelf simply for the vast variety and opportunity it contains. Contrary to my usual approach, since these are all familiar "classics", I'll put the reviews in the order they appear in the book, instead of ranked by my opinion.
In "The Mysterious Mansion" by Honoré de Balzac, a man discovers the story behind a grand manor, now abandoned, and an act of horrific cruelty perpetrated by a husband on his unfaithful wife. A solid, old-style conte cruel - told in a fable-like, straight-ahead fashion.
There's "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe, wherein a drunkard relates how his brutal crime originated. I tend not to do in-depth reviews of classics, as they've already been picked over by much stronger minds than mine. But what strikes me about this story is that while "The Telltale Heart" may earn its status as a compact horror masterpiece, "The Pit & The Pendulum" completely nails its suspense scenario (even with an abrupt, albeit justified, ending), and "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" lives up to its Gothic symbolism, "The Black Cat" tends to get short shrift (if for nothing else the near replication of the climax of "Heart", although here the suspense is externalized, not internal) - and that overlook is undeserved. I like how it is unreliable (told to us by an alcoholic prone to fits of violent anger, attempting to justify himself), dry in its recitation of the facts (with occasional moments of dramatic "fits") and especially how the wife/victim - subject of physical abuse - slowly takes on the better characteristics of both the narrator (his supposed loving nature towards animals) and the cat/s. Great stuff, without an ounce of literary fat.
Meanwhile, in "A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins, a man wins big at a disreputable casino and then, overcome by drink (or something more?) agrees to spend the night in a room upstairs, a room with a very strange bed. Nice little bit of suspense writing which I am now old enough to re-appreciate (having dismissed it during my pretentious, middle-aged, "horror is important and deep and needs to have meaning" phase). I particularly liked the bit where some moonlight through a window triggers an unexpected and forgotten memory in our narrator.
Thomas Hardy's "The Three Strangers" is less of a "terror tale" and more of an ironic suspense story, while also having the feel of a local legend or bit of folklore. Three strangers turn up at an isolated homestead on a stormy night when the farmer is celebrating the christening of his daughter... but this is not a religious allegory at all, and the tale turns on identification and mis-identification. I enjoyed it for the authentic and interesting portrayal of rural gatherings and the accepted rules of social etiquette of the time, but less as a supposed "scary" story.
The famed author of "The Monkey's Paw" (hands down one of the greatest scare stories ever written - and if you think you're too familiar with it to find it effective, go ahead a re-read it sometime soon. It's a masterpiece), W.W. Jacobs, only had fair-to-middling success with his other tales (although I did like "The Well", which I reviewed in Ghost Stories). Here we are given his piece "The Interruption", which is a tightly written tale in which a man succeeds at murdering his wife, only to realize that the overlooked housemaid now has much more power in the household. I dug it - like something from a later Alfred Hitchcock anthology.
"Pollock And The Porroh Man" is an H.G. Wells story that's long been on my "to be read" lists and, having now read it, I can see why. The "white man stumbles against tribal magic" story trope may be old hat by now (see also Kipling's "Mark Of The Beast", White's "Lukundoo", and endless pulp and EC comics stories, etc. etc.) but Wells does an amazing job here making it very exciting indeed. This is one of my favorite stories here, as a British soldier is cursed by a tribal witch doctor and takes a nightmare plunge down into the classic scenario of flight, terror, rationalizing and anthropological reinforcement. It's brilliantly handled (Wells has such a great touch for detail like the character and dialogue of the Portuguese Jew, Perea, or the initial "upside-down" look the witch-doctors casts backwards at the soldier, and how it resonates throughout the tale) and thoroughly entertaining and I wonder why no one has even made a short film of it (it's a very *visual* tale) - at least as far as I know of. Its placement in the book is an interesting and valid choice as well - and what a last line!
Wells appears again with "The Sea Raiders", a monster story in which he mixes a number of writing styles - scholarly science, journalistic distance and snappy, realistic action all feature in this recounting of mankind's first encounters with an aggressive new breed of cephalopod. Fun stuff.
As might be expected, H.H. Munro (Saki) is represented by his classic "Sredni Vashtar" - and who couldn't relish this lean, compact, nasty tale of childhood paganism and the usurping of adult control (Conradin's secret world of animal gods strikes me as having something of an air of chaos magick about it).
"Moonlight Sonata" by Alexander Woolcott is a droll little macabre piece in which a man, visiting a friend's estate and finding him absent, spends the night - only to spy a ghost near his door, quietly embroidering. But as it turns out, it isn't a ghost and that isn't what it is doing. I upgraded this a bit on the reread but not by much. I appreciated its drollness a bit more now, and its attempt to sell the story as true, but still it seems a bit of macabre slumming.
Conrad Aiken's "Mr. Arcularis" is a personal favorite of mine but I've never read his justifiably acclaimed "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" until encountering it here (although I do remember the adaptation of it on Rod Serling's NIGHT GALLERY, narrated by Orson Welles). A deceptively simple story (in his mind a young boy begins to withdraw from the world behind an imaginary layer of snowfall) that has been widely interpreted (analogies of sensitivity, creativity, escapism, adolescence, even deafness) but I believe the introduction to the story gives the most likely reading - the onset of mental illness (possibly schizophrenia or autism) or obsession in a young mind, the drawing further and further away from the real world and deeper and deeper into imagination, the fascination with repetition and a calm, controllable environment. It's a fascinating, at times lyrical piece.
A proper British businessman lives his punctual life - caring for his nervously afflicted wife, tending his garden, putting in hours at work, hiring a new cook, reading the hubbub in the news about an arsenic-poisoner on the loose - until he begins to suffer odd stomach pains in Dorothy L. Sayers "Suspicion". This is a fun read - in a way, it's using the suspense approach to play against the expected stiff-upper-lip, mustn't-jump-to-conclusions, stolid Englishman, really tightening down the screws as you sit there thinking "c'mon, man!". The last line is excellent.
Everyone by now knows Richard Connell' s "The Most Dangerous Game" - guys falls off a yacht, swims to Caribbean island owned by a Russian General who enjoys big-game hunting but who has become bored with the endeavor until he discovered new prey to hunt. What's impressive on rereading this is how lean and carved down this adventure/suspense story is - it knows the story it wants to tell and proceeds to tell it, with little to no adornment or wasted verbiage. And that ending is quite nicely pulled off as well. Still a solid story. PLEASE SEE our free reading at PSEUDOPOD.
In "The Gentleman From America" by Michael Arlen two well off Britishers bet the titular character that, for 500£, he cannot sleep overnight in the haunted room. He attempts it, only to eventually face-off against a terrifying apparition. Fast forward a number of years, when the 3 men are reunited and truths are told...This is an odd and interesting little story - not perhaps the story itself, exactly (which seems to owe quite a bit to Ambrose Bierce's "A Watcher By The Dead"), but the disparate parts - the set up is classic (daring to stay in a notorious haunted room - see "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells for one example), while the tone is humorous (if not fully comic) with the stiff Brits playing off the optimistic and blunt American caricature. Then, there's a story within the story ("The Phantom Footsteps") as the American settles down to read a children's book of ghost stories that has been left by the bed. The apparition is strikingly described (headless, with longer and longer arms!) - and then there's the flash forward, which puts everything in a frame (while not, it seems, intending to imply a humorous cast to the later events). Neat.
In "A Rose For Emily" by William Faulkner, a reclusive, aged scion of a gentile Southern town finally dies, and we are treated to a tour through her conflicted history with the townspeople, even as a locked room in her mansion reveals a final surprise. A solid Southern Gothic, short and pithy, sketching out the trapped situation that the moneyed classes, and especially unmarried women, found themselves in in the Old South.
Next up is Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" - a stripped-down noir piece (without the hysterical trappings of, say, Cornell Woolrich) that has echoes forwards in time to, for example, Cronenberg's film A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. We get a simple setting (a small town diner) and two threatening thugs come to deliver a message. It's all clipped, small phrases and repetition (because it's Hemingway) and some "realistic to the time" racial epithets, but the best part of it (outside of the thug's mannerisms) is that the target of the threat, when finally warned, is resigned to his fate. In that, it's very much like Woolrich, the unknown and unknowable human machinations of fate that grind away behind the facade of society, waiting to chew up people who step over lines.
"Back For Christmas" - by another personal favorite writer, John Collier, is familiar to me as it was adapted a number of times on old radio dramas (SUSPENSE, etc.). That's understandable as it's a slick, whittled down murder story - not a mystery or even much of a crime story but, like the Jacobs piece earlier, more in the line of an ironic ending ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS episode - not a "whodunnit" but a "willhegetawaywithit?" Another slight but fun read.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS 1
June 20, 2008
As the above description notes, the tales in this anthology (by 27 19th and 20th century authors, mostly British or American --Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, M. R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, H. P. Lovecraft, E. F. Benson, and Algernon Blackwood are each represented twice) depict both naturalistic and supernatural themes; the two are separated into two distinct sections: 20 "Tales of [naturally-caused] Terror," and 32 "Tales of the Supernatural" [which are not necessarily terrifying in intent, though they usually are]. (Which are which, of course, can be a matter of editorial opinion; I would have placed Wells' "Pollock and the Pooroh Man" in the latter section, for instance, and both Lovecraft stories in the former.) When I first read the book a couple of years ago, I'd read only the supernatural section (since that interested me the most); but I recently decided to read the whole thing in order to review it here, and the first section proved fully worth the read as well! The plot arcs of the stories run the gamut from tragedies, through tales of evil punished, to happy endings; the tone is usually dark and serious, but a few are actually dryly humorous.
Some of the naturalistic terrors are science-fictional in nature; murder and madness are of course staples, in many and varied permutations; and Carl Stephenson's "Leiningen Versus the Ants" is one of the greatest tales of the "man vs. nature," theme ever penned, and evokes a genuine terror from it that remains suspenseful right down to the end. And some of these stories offer serious thought content: "The Most Dangerous Game," for instance, forces the reader to confront the question, does human life have intrinsic value as human life? (Connell, in defiance of much modern philosophy, answers with an unequivocal "Yes!")
Ghost stories are the staple of the supernatural section; but E. F. Benson's "Mrs. Amworth" is an outstanding vampire story (and one of those which features the theory that the vampire is not actually the deceased person, but an evil spirit that inhabits the deceased person's body), and such themes as demons, African tribal magic, and shape-shifting sorcery make an appearance, too. (Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" posits reincarnation, and "The Great God Pan" is an exercise in existential horror; but neither of these ideas are very common in this book.) Besides those mentioned in the above description, some of the best stories here include Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea," Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One," and F. Marion Crawford's "The Screaming Skull."
Some of the naturalistic terrors are science-fictional in nature; murder and madness are of course staples, in many and varied permutations; and Carl Stephenson's "Leiningen Versus the Ants" is one of the greatest tales of the "man vs. nature," theme ever penned, and evokes a genuine terror from it that remains suspenseful right down to the end. And some of these stories offer serious thought content: "The Most Dangerous Game," for instance, forces the reader to confront the question, does human life have intrinsic value as human life? (Connell, in defiance of much modern philosophy, answers with an unequivocal "Yes!")
Ghost stories are the staple of the supernatural section; but E. F. Benson's "Mrs. Amworth" is an outstanding vampire story (and one of those which features the theory that the vampire is not actually the deceased person, but an evil spirit that inhabits the deceased person's body), and such themes as demons, African tribal magic, and shape-shifting sorcery make an appearance, too. (Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" posits reincarnation, and "The Great God Pan" is an exercise in existential horror; but neither of these ideas are very common in this book.) Besides those mentioned in the above description, some of the best stories here include Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea," Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One," and F. Marion Crawford's "The Screaming Skull."
November 4, 2014
Basically a collection of the acknowledged classics of the ghost and/or thriller genres. A more classics-oriented approach (or mainstream, one might even say) than the VanderMeer’s The Weird, but that makes the two of them excellent companions. Arranged, supposedly, into a natural and a supernatural section, and since I greatly prefer supernatural to non-supernatural horror, it gets most of the filler out of the way in the beginning. Some of the choices are rather inexplicable - “Pollock and the Porroh Man” can be read either way, but is near the beginning of the book, while Saki’s “The Window” is explicitly not a supernatural story, but that’s where the editors put it.
Almost entirely English/American with the exceptions of De Maupassant and Dinesen, I believe, and the gender balance is sadly tilted in the usual direction.
La Grande Bretêche • (1832) • Honoré de Balzac
The one where a “haunted house” is created not by ghosts, but by the memory of some unpleasantries involving a cheating wife and her would-be lover being walled into a closet by the husband - very proto-Poe. Framed by a man staying in the town’s inn after the death, years later, of the wife in question. 3/5
The Black Cat • (1843) • Edgar Allan Poe
The one where an alcoholic tortures his cat to death, which gets revenge from beyond the grave by tricking him into murdering his wife and then revealing the fact that he sealed her up in a wall - shades of “La Grande Breteche,” but also of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (and every other Poe story that involves premature burial). Framed as the confession of the murderer. If this story is not supernatural, it is predicated on a lot of bizarre and unlikely coincidences. 2/5
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar • (1845) • Edgar Allan Poe
The one where mesmerism is used to forestall the moment of death; giving us the first grey area - now, what is mesmerism but supernaturalism, but does science fiction, proven untrue, pass into fantasy, or would that be ahistorical? 3/5
A Terribly Strange Bed • (1852) • Wilkie Collins
The one where a man, after a night of debauchery, stays the night in the gambling den where he just won a fortune, only to nearly be murdered by means of a terribly strange bed. The scheme didn’t make much sense, but the story was written well enough and the scene with the attempted suffocation was suitably jarring. 3/5
The Boarded Window • (1889) • Ambrose Bierce
The one where an American frontiersman keeps one window boarded up after the death of his wife - either from disease or a panther attack, it’s an Ambrose story, so the unreliable narration never makes it clear. Short and bitter. 5/5
The Three Strangers • (1883) • Thomas Hardy
The one where a rural party is interrupted by the staggered arrival of the titular gentlemen, one of whom is an escaped convict. A slight tinge of suspense, but certainly no terror. 3/5
The Interruption • (1925) • W. W. Jacobs
The one where a man has murdered his wife (but not any of those others where a man has murdered his wife), and is then blackmailed by the servant into increasing her lot in life. I was entirely sympathetic to the servant, although I don’t think I was supposed to be. 2/5
Pollock and the Porroh Man • (1895) • H. G. Wells
The one where a white British colonialist runs afoul of a shaman in Africa, has him killed, and pays the price - whether this is a supernatural price or a psychological one is explicitly unclear. Could be read productively in tandem with “Lukundu” or the works of Henry S. Whitehead in terms of the supernatural costs of colonialism. Perhaps Richard Matheson’s much-later “Prey” could be thrown into the mix too. 4/5
The Sea Raiders • (1896) • H. G. Wells
The one where monstrous octopi devour a bunch of pleasure-seekers on the English shore. Nothing more, nothing less, but what more could you need? 4/5
Sredni Vashtar • (1911) • Saki
The one where a lonely boy keeps and worships a ferret in the back yard, who eventually gets revenge on the boy’s abusive caretaker - supernaturally, or naturally? Shades of Pollock. I enjoyed this one more here than in The Weird, which seems to ring true for my second readings of most old Weird tales. 4/5
Moonlight Sonata • (1931) • Alexander Woollcott
The one where a visitor to a supposedly-haunted castle thinks he saw a ghost, but it was really just a much more mundane monstrosity. 2/5
Silent Snow, Secret Snow • (1932) • Conrad Aiken
The one where Conrad Aiken proves once again to be a master of a very melancholic and beautiful descent into uncertainty and the surreal, this time via the story of a boy who sees and hears encroaching snow where no one else does. 5/5
Suspicion • (1933) • Dorothy L. Sayers
The one where a domestic has been poisoning her employers, and our protagonist begins to feel mighty suspicious about his new cook… 2/5
Most Dangerous Game • (1924) • Richard Edward Connell
The one where a man hunts another man. A famous story, for no reason at all that I can tell. 1/5
Leiningen Versus the Ants • (1938) • Carl Stephenson
The one where a colonialist defends his Brazilian plantation against a ravenous horde of army ants. Not particularly interesting, and frightfully patronizing toward the Brazilians ("The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss"), but at least it was better than the previous story. 2/5
The Gentleman from America • (1924) • Michael Arlen
The one where two British knaves trick an American caricature (a hilarious American caricature!) into thinking he was being attacked by ghosts. Things don’t work out well for any of them. I actually really enjoyed this one. 4/5
A Rose for Emily • (1930) • William Faulkner
The one where Southern gentility is a mask for something rather gruesome. One of the all-time greats, of course. 5/5
The Killers • (1927) • shortstory by Ernest Hemingway
The one where some killers threaten an ex-boxer in a small town. Even as the non-supernatural stories go, this was not terrifying or even really tense at all. 1/5
Back for Christmas • (1939) • shortstory by John Collier
The one where a man murders his meddling wife and finds that her meddling extends from beyond the grave. Ho hum. I expected more from Collier. 2/5
Taboo • (1939) • Geoffrey Household
The one where a town is convinced they have a werewolf problem. It turns out they have a cannibal problem, which is even worse. 5/5
The Haunters and the Haunted: or, The House and the Brain • (1859) • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The one where Bulwer-Lytton makes painfully clear he doesn’t know when to stop: we go from rather excellent haunted house story, to bizarre pseudo-scientific explanation of said haunting, to downright inexplicable wizard’s revenge story. This is the first of the supernatural stories, although it is kind of the epitome of the use of fringe science to explain its supernatural activity. 2/5
Rappaccini's Daughter • (1844) • Nathaniel Hawthorne
The one where a young man in an archaic Italy falls for the poisonous daughter of his scholarly neighbor. Often reprinted, but justifiably so. 4/5
The Trial for Murder • (1865) • Charles Dickens
The one where a murder victim gets justice by tampering with the jury. 2/5
Green Tea • (1869) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The one where a scholar is driven to madness and suicide by the stalking of a demonic monkey, perhaps a hallucination created by his consumption of green tea. Another classic (to be fair, most of the stories in this book are considered classics of the field), but another that just never really coheres for me. A large part of this might be my inability to take a demonic monkey seriously. 2/5
What Was It? • (1859) • Fitz-James O'Brien
The one where an invisible monster attacks a man in bed in the middle of the night. Another often-reprinted classic, this one has never done all that much for me, although I do appreciate the inability of modernity to preserve or make anything of the monster. 3/5
Sir Edmund Orme • (1891) • Henry James
The one where a young man can see the ghost of his girlfriend’s mother’s dead boyfriend. Said ghost is not menacing, just kind of despondently present sometimes. Doesn’t amount to much of anything. 2/5
The Horla, or Modern Ghosts • (1886) • Guy de Maupassant
The one where a man is haunted by some sort of invisible, malevolent entity from beyond the stars - or else he’s just insane. Pre-Lovecraft Lovecraft. 4/5
Was It a Dream? • (1910) • Guy de Maupassant
The one where a grieving widower sees the dead rise up from their graves to correct the banalities written on their tombstones. Short, simple, excellent. 5/5
The Screaming Skull • (1908) • F. Marion Crawford
The one where an aging sea captain has to live with the skull of his dead friend’s dead wife. The skull blames him for her death. Written, unusually, as the sea captain’s half of a conversation, with his conversant’s responses omitted. Also in the _The Weird_ but, as always, I enjoyed this more the second time. 5/5
The Furnished Room • (1904) • O. Henry
The one where a man, searching for his missing girlfriend, commits suicide, only for the reader to discover that the girlfriend had killed herself in the same room shortly before. Incoherent and pointless. 1/5
Casting the Runes • (1911) • M. R. James
The one where I have read it often enough recently and didn’t have the desire to read it again right now.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad • (1904) • M. R. James
The one where a historian uncovers an antiquarian whistle that would have been better left covered. Much, much better than “Casting the Runes” - effectively mysterious and suffused with dread, whereas “Casting” hangs mostly on the rather cartoonish villain. 5/5
Afterward • (1910) • Edith Wharton
The one where the ghostly presence in a haunted house makes itself known only long after the fact. Like the James, this is a rather staid and bloodless (in both ways) ghost story, but the narrative foreshadowing is excellent, and the protagonist’s hopelessness is captured exceedingly well. 5/5
The Monkey's Paw • (1902) • W. W. Jacobs
The one where… well, you know. 5/5
The Great God Pan • (1894) • Arthur Machen
The one where a scientist seeking to expand the human mind sends his test subject through the veil (to “see the Great God Pan”), leaving her mindless and pregnant. Her daughter later wreaks havoc throughout London and the world, drawing her husband(s) into an orgiastic and heretical lifestyle that leads to their suicides. A disappointment next to Machen’s beautiful and otherworldly “The White People.” More fixated on the unveiling of cosmic horror than are most of the works here, which buys it a few points in my book, although what Machen does with the aftermath here interests me very little. 2/5
How Love Came to Professor Guildea • (1897) • Robert Hichens
The one where a resolutely unemotional man of science becomes haunted by a mewling invisible thing that wants only to love him. Includes an incredibly creepy scene involving a parrot. The narrator/protagonist, Guildea’s best friend and a man of God, watches this all unfold with great sadness for the inability of the rational mind to cope with emotion/the supernatural. One of the best. 5/5
The Return of Imray • (1891) • Rudyard Kipling
The one where a British colonialist runs afoul of his primitive, superstitious Indian servant, who then runs afoul of a snake. 1/5
"They" • (1904) • Rudyard Kipling
The one where a motorist finds, by accident, an isolated house where children always seem to be playing just out of the corner of his eye. Much of it is implicit rather than explicit, which I like, but it’s also a bit on the twee side, which I don’t. 3/5
Lukundoo • (1907) • Edward Lucas White
The one where a British colonialist runs afoul of an African shaman, who runs afoul of nothing. 5/5
Caterpillars • (1912) • E. F. Benson
The one where spectral caterpillar/crabs stand in for cancer contagion. 4/5
Mrs. Amworth • (1922) • E. F. Benson
The one where the titular vampire is dispatched. I read this expecting some sort of twist or surprise, to no avail but, as it goes, it worked well enough. I guess it is unusual for the vampire to be a kind of suburban housewife type? 3/5
Ancient Sorceries] • (1908) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
The one where an Englishman gets off a train at a mysterious French village, only to find that this idyllic community is masking a darker reality. The foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed
Confession • (1921) • Algernon Blackwood and Wilfred Wilson
The one where a gentleman strolling through a foggy afternoon in London is distracted by a ghostly woman who leads him into a house where her husband confesses to having killed her. All rather nightmarish and surreal. Seems rather urban for a Blackwood story, so you have to wonder how much he had to do with it. 3/5
The Open Window • (1911) • Saki
The one where a man visits a country estate, where the young daughter of the house tells him a ghost story, tricking him into believing it’s true. This one is explicitly not supernatural, and also not really much of a story. 2/5
The Beckoning Fair One • (1911) • Oliver Onions
The one where an author moves to a new house and either falls under the spell of a ghost or just loses his mind. A bit too much happened off-screen for it to be entirely satisfying. 4/5
Out of the Deep • (1923) • Walter de la Mare
The one where a young man comes back to the dreaded house of his childhood to live out his final days. Some spectral visitations involving ghostly servants take place. Against what I just said about the Onions, just enough happens off-screen to make it entirely satisfying. Definitely asks to be re-read. 5/5
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me • (1921) • A. E. Coppard
The one where a man seems to have become a ghost, intangible and invisible to his wife, servant, and three children.Off to a great start, things get derailed when he wakes from his dream and remembers he has only two children - but his wife, previously unbeknownst to him, is pregnant. 2/5
The Celestial Omnibus • (1908) • E. M. Forster
The one where a boy takes a taxi carriage from the end of an alleyway to a magical kingdom of literary figures. When a spoilsport adult later accompanies him, he falls to his death. The worst kind of sentimental tripe. 1/5
The Ghost Ship • (1912) • Richard Middleton
The one where a ghostly ship washes up in an English village and proceeds to ruin the morals of all the local boys. Light-hearted, whimsical, utterly uninteresting. 1/5
The Sailor-Boy's Tale • (1942) • Karen Blixen [as by Isak Dinesen ]
The one where a sailor boy saves a bird, murders a drinking companion, and is saved in turn. The murder is oddly glossed over, but I suppose that works with the mythic/unworldly tones of the story, which reminded me a bit of Valente’s Orphan’s Tales. 4/5
The Rats in the Walls • (1924) • H. P. Lovecraft
The one where a typically stuffy Lovecraft protagonist moves from New England to Old England to restore the ancestral estate, much to the distress of the locals. Once moved in, the noise of the titular creatures draws him underground, where he makes a gruesome (although relatively small-fry for Lovecraft!) discovery. Perhaps the quintessential Lovecraft story - creepy, well-plotted, and marred even more explicitly than usual by racism. 3/5
The Dunwich Horror • (1929) • H. P. Lovecraft
The one where a miscegenetic monster terrorizes Dunwich until it’s defeated by a band of hearty academics. I’ve never understood the anthologization of this one over any number of other Lovecraft stories - it overstays its welcome, the ending makes it a bizarre outlier, and it doesn’t do anything that Lovecraft doesn’t do better elsewhere. 2/5
Almost entirely English/American with the exceptions of De Maupassant and Dinesen, I believe, and the gender balance is sadly tilted in the usual direction.
La Grande Bretêche • (1832) • Honoré de Balzac
The one where a “haunted house” is created not by ghosts, but by the memory of some unpleasantries involving a cheating wife and her would-be lover being walled into a closet by the husband - very proto-Poe. Framed by a man staying in the town’s inn after the death, years later, of the wife in question. 3/5
The Black Cat • (1843) • Edgar Allan Poe
The one where an alcoholic tortures his cat to death, which gets revenge from beyond the grave by tricking him into murdering his wife and then revealing the fact that he sealed her up in a wall - shades of “La Grande Breteche,” but also of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (and every other Poe story that involves premature burial). Framed as the confession of the murderer. If this story is not supernatural, it is predicated on a lot of bizarre and unlikely coincidences. 2/5
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar • (1845) • Edgar Allan Poe
The one where mesmerism is used to forestall the moment of death; giving us the first grey area - now, what is mesmerism but supernaturalism, but does science fiction, proven untrue, pass into fantasy, or would that be ahistorical? 3/5
A Terribly Strange Bed • (1852) • Wilkie Collins
The one where a man, after a night of debauchery, stays the night in the gambling den where he just won a fortune, only to nearly be murdered by means of a terribly strange bed. The scheme didn’t make much sense, but the story was written well enough and the scene with the attempted suffocation was suitably jarring. 3/5
The Boarded Window • (1889) • Ambrose Bierce
The one where an American frontiersman keeps one window boarded up after the death of his wife - either from disease or a panther attack, it’s an Ambrose story, so the unreliable narration never makes it clear. Short and bitter. 5/5
The Three Strangers • (1883) • Thomas Hardy
The one where a rural party is interrupted by the staggered arrival of the titular gentlemen, one of whom is an escaped convict. A slight tinge of suspense, but certainly no terror. 3/5
The Interruption • (1925) • W. W. Jacobs
The one where a man has murdered his wife (but not any of those others where a man has murdered his wife), and is then blackmailed by the servant into increasing her lot in life. I was entirely sympathetic to the servant, although I don’t think I was supposed to be. 2/5
Pollock and the Porroh Man • (1895) • H. G. Wells
The one where a white British colonialist runs afoul of a shaman in Africa, has him killed, and pays the price - whether this is a supernatural price or a psychological one is explicitly unclear. Could be read productively in tandem with “Lukundu” or the works of Henry S. Whitehead in terms of the supernatural costs of colonialism. Perhaps Richard Matheson’s much-later “Prey” could be thrown into the mix too. 4/5
The Sea Raiders • (1896) • H. G. Wells
The one where monstrous octopi devour a bunch of pleasure-seekers on the English shore. Nothing more, nothing less, but what more could you need? 4/5
Sredni Vashtar • (1911) • Saki
The one where a lonely boy keeps and worships a ferret in the back yard, who eventually gets revenge on the boy’s abusive caretaker - supernaturally, or naturally? Shades of Pollock. I enjoyed this one more here than in The Weird, which seems to ring true for my second readings of most old Weird tales. 4/5
Moonlight Sonata • (1931) • Alexander Woollcott
The one where a visitor to a supposedly-haunted castle thinks he saw a ghost, but it was really just a much more mundane monstrosity. 2/5
Silent Snow, Secret Snow • (1932) • Conrad Aiken
The one where Conrad Aiken proves once again to be a master of a very melancholic and beautiful descent into uncertainty and the surreal, this time via the story of a boy who sees and hears encroaching snow where no one else does. 5/5
Suspicion • (1933) • Dorothy L. Sayers
The one where a domestic has been poisoning her employers, and our protagonist begins to feel mighty suspicious about his new cook… 2/5
Most Dangerous Game • (1924) • Richard Edward Connell
The one where a man hunts another man. A famous story, for no reason at all that I can tell. 1/5
Leiningen Versus the Ants • (1938) • Carl Stephenson
The one where a colonialist defends his Brazilian plantation against a ravenous horde of army ants. Not particularly interesting, and frightfully patronizing toward the Brazilians ("The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss"), but at least it was better than the previous story. 2/5
The Gentleman from America • (1924) • Michael Arlen
The one where two British knaves trick an American caricature (a hilarious American caricature!) into thinking he was being attacked by ghosts. Things don’t work out well for any of them. I actually really enjoyed this one. 4/5
A Rose for Emily • (1930) • William Faulkner
The one where Southern gentility is a mask for something rather gruesome. One of the all-time greats, of course. 5/5
The Killers • (1927) • shortstory by Ernest Hemingway
The one where some killers threaten an ex-boxer in a small town. Even as the non-supernatural stories go, this was not terrifying or even really tense at all. 1/5
Back for Christmas • (1939) • shortstory by John Collier
The one where a man murders his meddling wife and finds that her meddling extends from beyond the grave. Ho hum. I expected more from Collier. 2/5
Taboo • (1939) • Geoffrey Household
The one where a town is convinced they have a werewolf problem. It turns out they have a cannibal problem, which is even worse. 5/5
The Haunters and the Haunted: or, The House and the Brain • (1859) • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The one where Bulwer-Lytton makes painfully clear he doesn’t know when to stop: we go from rather excellent haunted house story, to bizarre pseudo-scientific explanation of said haunting, to downright inexplicable wizard’s revenge story. This is the first of the supernatural stories, although it is kind of the epitome of the use of fringe science to explain its supernatural activity. 2/5
Rappaccini's Daughter • (1844) • Nathaniel Hawthorne
The one where a young man in an archaic Italy falls for the poisonous daughter of his scholarly neighbor. Often reprinted, but justifiably so. 4/5
The Trial for Murder • (1865) • Charles Dickens
The one where a murder victim gets justice by tampering with the jury. 2/5
Green Tea • (1869) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The one where a scholar is driven to madness and suicide by the stalking of a demonic monkey, perhaps a hallucination created by his consumption of green tea. Another classic (to be fair, most of the stories in this book are considered classics of the field), but another that just never really coheres for me. A large part of this might be my inability to take a demonic monkey seriously. 2/5
What Was It? • (1859) • Fitz-James O'Brien
The one where an invisible monster attacks a man in bed in the middle of the night. Another often-reprinted classic, this one has never done all that much for me, although I do appreciate the inability of modernity to preserve or make anything of the monster. 3/5
Sir Edmund Orme • (1891) • Henry James
The one where a young man can see the ghost of his girlfriend’s mother’s dead boyfriend. Said ghost is not menacing, just kind of despondently present sometimes. Doesn’t amount to much of anything. 2/5
The Horla, or Modern Ghosts • (1886) • Guy de Maupassant
The one where a man is haunted by some sort of invisible, malevolent entity from beyond the stars - or else he’s just insane. Pre-Lovecraft Lovecraft. 4/5
Was It a Dream? • (1910) • Guy de Maupassant
The one where a grieving widower sees the dead rise up from their graves to correct the banalities written on their tombstones. Short, simple, excellent. 5/5
The Screaming Skull • (1908) • F. Marion Crawford
The one where an aging sea captain has to live with the skull of his dead friend’s dead wife. The skull blames him for her death. Written, unusually, as the sea captain’s half of a conversation, with his conversant’s responses omitted. Also in the _The Weird_ but, as always, I enjoyed this more the second time. 5/5
The Furnished Room • (1904) • O. Henry
The one where a man, searching for his missing girlfriend, commits suicide, only for the reader to discover that the girlfriend had killed herself in the same room shortly before. Incoherent and pointless. 1/5
Casting the Runes • (1911) • M. R. James
The one where I have read it often enough recently and didn’t have the desire to read it again right now.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad • (1904) • M. R. James
The one where a historian uncovers an antiquarian whistle that would have been better left covered. Much, much better than “Casting the Runes” - effectively mysterious and suffused with dread, whereas “Casting” hangs mostly on the rather cartoonish villain. 5/5
Afterward • (1910) • Edith Wharton
The one where the ghostly presence in a haunted house makes itself known only long after the fact. Like the James, this is a rather staid and bloodless (in both ways) ghost story, but the narrative foreshadowing is excellent, and the protagonist’s hopelessness is captured exceedingly well. 5/5
The Monkey's Paw • (1902) • W. W. Jacobs
The one where… well, you know. 5/5
The Great God Pan • (1894) • Arthur Machen
The one where a scientist seeking to expand the human mind sends his test subject through the veil (to “see the Great God Pan”), leaving her mindless and pregnant. Her daughter later wreaks havoc throughout London and the world, drawing her husband(s) into an orgiastic and heretical lifestyle that leads to their suicides. A disappointment next to Machen’s beautiful and otherworldly “The White People.” More fixated on the unveiling of cosmic horror than are most of the works here, which buys it a few points in my book, although what Machen does with the aftermath here interests me very little. 2/5
How Love Came to Professor Guildea • (1897) • Robert Hichens
The one where a resolutely unemotional man of science becomes haunted by a mewling invisible thing that wants only to love him. Includes an incredibly creepy scene involving a parrot. The narrator/protagonist, Guildea’s best friend and a man of God, watches this all unfold with great sadness for the inability of the rational mind to cope with emotion/the supernatural. One of the best. 5/5
The Return of Imray • (1891) • Rudyard Kipling
The one where a British colonialist runs afoul of his primitive, superstitious Indian servant, who then runs afoul of a snake. 1/5
"They" • (1904) • Rudyard Kipling
The one where a motorist finds, by accident, an isolated house where children always seem to be playing just out of the corner of his eye. Much of it is implicit rather than explicit, which I like, but it’s also a bit on the twee side, which I don’t. 3/5
Lukundoo • (1907) • Edward Lucas White
The one where a British colonialist runs afoul of an African shaman, who runs afoul of nothing. 5/5
Caterpillars • (1912) • E. F. Benson
The one where spectral caterpillar/crabs stand in for cancer contagion. 4/5
Mrs. Amworth • (1922) • E. F. Benson
The one where the titular vampire is dispatched. I read this expecting some sort of twist or surprise, to no avail but, as it goes, it worked well enough. I guess it is unusual for the vampire to be a kind of suburban housewife type? 3/5
Ancient Sorceries] • (1908) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
The one where an Englishman gets off a train at a mysterious French village, only to find that this idyllic community is masking a darker reality. The foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed
Confession • (1921) • Algernon Blackwood and Wilfred Wilson
The one where a gentleman strolling through a foggy afternoon in London is distracted by a ghostly woman who leads him into a house where her husband confesses to having killed her. All rather nightmarish and surreal. Seems rather urban for a Blackwood story, so you have to wonder how much he had to do with it. 3/5
The Open Window • (1911) • Saki
The one where a man visits a country estate, where the young daughter of the house tells him a ghost story, tricking him into believing it’s true. This one is explicitly not supernatural, and also not really much of a story. 2/5
The Beckoning Fair One • (1911) • Oliver Onions
The one where an author moves to a new house and either falls under the spell of a ghost or just loses his mind. A bit too much happened off-screen for it to be entirely satisfying. 4/5
Out of the Deep • (1923) • Walter de la Mare
The one where a young man comes back to the dreaded house of his childhood to live out his final days. Some spectral visitations involving ghostly servants take place. Against what I just said about the Onions, just enough happens off-screen to make it entirely satisfying. Definitely asks to be re-read. 5/5
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me • (1921) • A. E. Coppard
The one where a man seems to have become a ghost, intangible and invisible to his wife, servant, and three children.Off to a great start, things get derailed when he wakes from his dream and remembers he has only two children - but his wife, previously unbeknownst to him, is pregnant. 2/5
The Celestial Omnibus • (1908) • E. M. Forster
The one where a boy takes a taxi carriage from the end of an alleyway to a magical kingdom of literary figures. When a spoilsport adult later accompanies him, he falls to his death. The worst kind of sentimental tripe. 1/5
The Ghost Ship • (1912) • Richard Middleton
The one where a ghostly ship washes up in an English village and proceeds to ruin the morals of all the local boys. Light-hearted, whimsical, utterly uninteresting. 1/5
The Sailor-Boy's Tale • (1942) • Karen Blixen [as by Isak Dinesen ]
The one where a sailor boy saves a bird, murders a drinking companion, and is saved in turn. The murder is oddly glossed over, but I suppose that works with the mythic/unworldly tones of the story, which reminded me a bit of Valente’s Orphan’s Tales. 4/5
The Rats in the Walls • (1924) • H. P. Lovecraft
The one where a typically stuffy Lovecraft protagonist moves from New England to Old England to restore the ancestral estate, much to the distress of the locals. Once moved in, the noise of the titular creatures draws him underground, where he makes a gruesome (although relatively small-fry for Lovecraft!) discovery. Perhaps the quintessential Lovecraft story - creepy, well-plotted, and marred even more explicitly than usual by racism. 3/5
The Dunwich Horror • (1929) • H. P. Lovecraft
The one where a miscegenetic monster terrorizes Dunwich until it’s defeated by a band of hearty academics. I’ve never understood the anthologization of this one over any number of other Lovecraft stories - it overstays its welcome, the ending makes it a bizarre outlier, and it doesn’t do anything that Lovecraft doesn’t do better elsewhere. 2/5
August 9, 2022
Lots of good authors and great stories, but this book confirmed for me that Lovecraft is still the best when it comes to horror.
October 31, 2018
This was a good book. The first half were stories of high suspense and the second half, scary tales involving the supernatural.
Actually not all the stories were scary or suspenseful. Some of the suspenseful stories, are more accurately described as horror stories, like "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner or Geoffrey Housefold's "Taboo". And of course it would not be a complete analogy without some Edgar Allen Poe.
One of the most suspenseful stories is by Carl Stephenson titled, "Leiningen and the Ants", where a group of Europeans and Native South Americans try to stop a siege of local, giant killer ants.
The section of the supernatural has a couple of stories by well-known writers of ghost stories, like M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and F. Marion Crawford. But also by classic writers like Saki, Isak Dineson, E.M. Forester, Walter de la Mare and also the father of the weird, H.P. Lovecraft.
The book was published in 1944 and gives a brief biography of the authors, most of whom were still living at the time of the book's publication.
Actually not all the stories were scary or suspenseful. Some of the suspenseful stories, are more accurately described as horror stories, like "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner or Geoffrey Housefold's "Taboo". And of course it would not be a complete analogy without some Edgar Allen Poe.
One of the most suspenseful stories is by Carl Stephenson titled, "Leiningen and the Ants", where a group of Europeans and Native South Americans try to stop a siege of local, giant killer ants.
The section of the supernatural has a couple of stories by well-known writers of ghost stories, like M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and F. Marion Crawford. But also by classic writers like Saki, Isak Dineson, E.M. Forester, Walter de la Mare and also the father of the weird, H.P. Lovecraft.
The book was published in 1944 and gives a brief biography of the authors, most of whom were still living at the time of the book's publication.
March 31, 2021
It is possible to fault some of the ideas that Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser express about the nature of horror, but the two editors of this volume are to be praised for putting together such a wide range of stories in one volume.
Here are tales by Balzac, Ambrose Bierce, Karen Blixen, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu, William Faulkner, E M Forster, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, O Henry, Henry James, M R James, Kipling, Lovecraft, Walter de la Mare, Maupssant, Poe, Saki, H G Wells and Edith Wharton.
Many of the stories in this volume have been adapted into films, or have clearly inspired them. These include Night of the Demon, Cat People, The Killers (twice), The Naked Jungle, The Black Cat (several times), Tales of Terror, The Most Dangerous Game, The Monkey’s Paw and The Dunwich Horror.
Some of the items may be disputable as Tales of Terror. We might just about let a story about flesh-eating ants attacking a farm go by. But what of a tale of a man on the run who meets his hangman? Or two assassins who hold the staff of a café hostage while they wait for their intended victim? Or a man who thinks he is being poisoned by a servant?
What this volume makes clear is that tales of terror and supernatural can take many forms. If I am to define the qualities that make a story in this genre effective, I must frown and pause. As the tales here make clear, the tone can be humorous or deadly serious. The ending can be happy or tragic. The tone can be gentle, wistful, sad, comical or downright terrifying. Horror can be suggestive or explicit. It would seem that there are no rules.
I would say that the best horror stories have only one thing in common – that is, that they should pay some attention to building up an atmosphere of suspense. Mere acts of cannibalism, beheading, mutilation or slashing are little more than schlock unless there is some artistry to go with them.
A reader might remember a particularly nasty death, but the elements that cause a reader to remember an entire story is when the prose creates the right emotions in the reader. The sense that something strange is going to happen, and that it might be horrifying, or at least haunting. The story should build up to a climax of some kind, and not just tail off. The reader needs a pay-off for their patience.
There is another rule that I would not apply too universally, which is that it is often a mistake to over-explain supernatural events. In a few stories in this volume, the story stops in its tracks, sometimes right in the middle of the horrifying events, in order for the author to offer a bogus explanation for the supernatural.
A good tale can be made out of making the other-worldly seem scientific, but this often requires a longer work than a short story, and a writer who has a genuinely interesting and semi-convincing explanation for events. Often it is better to give a few details and let the reader decide for themselves.
I won’t talk in detail about the individual stories here. There are too many to describe in detail, and perhaps it is more fun to read them for yourself than hear any kind of summary or analysis of each one.
We can argue about which authors were not included, or about the choice of tale that the editors made for an individual author. However, every editor is allowed to have their own personal favourites, and that should not reflect the bias of the reader.
What comes across here is that Wise and Fraser had a genuine love for tales of terror and the supernatural, and were just as comfortable with nineteenth-century authors as they were with contemporaries. From Poe to Lovecraft, the editors were willing to enjoy even the more visceral and dark tales of the modern age.
I did not like all the choices in the book, but I applaud the editors for offering such a wide and varied choice for me to sample.
Here are tales by Balzac, Ambrose Bierce, Karen Blixen, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu, William Faulkner, E M Forster, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, O Henry, Henry James, M R James, Kipling, Lovecraft, Walter de la Mare, Maupssant, Poe, Saki, H G Wells and Edith Wharton.
Many of the stories in this volume have been adapted into films, or have clearly inspired them. These include Night of the Demon, Cat People, The Killers (twice), The Naked Jungle, The Black Cat (several times), Tales of Terror, The Most Dangerous Game, The Monkey’s Paw and The Dunwich Horror.
Some of the items may be disputable as Tales of Terror. We might just about let a story about flesh-eating ants attacking a farm go by. But what of a tale of a man on the run who meets his hangman? Or two assassins who hold the staff of a café hostage while they wait for their intended victim? Or a man who thinks he is being poisoned by a servant?
What this volume makes clear is that tales of terror and supernatural can take many forms. If I am to define the qualities that make a story in this genre effective, I must frown and pause. As the tales here make clear, the tone can be humorous or deadly serious. The ending can be happy or tragic. The tone can be gentle, wistful, sad, comical or downright terrifying. Horror can be suggestive or explicit. It would seem that there are no rules.
I would say that the best horror stories have only one thing in common – that is, that they should pay some attention to building up an atmosphere of suspense. Mere acts of cannibalism, beheading, mutilation or slashing are little more than schlock unless there is some artistry to go with them.
A reader might remember a particularly nasty death, but the elements that cause a reader to remember an entire story is when the prose creates the right emotions in the reader. The sense that something strange is going to happen, and that it might be horrifying, or at least haunting. The story should build up to a climax of some kind, and not just tail off. The reader needs a pay-off for their patience.
There is another rule that I would not apply too universally, which is that it is often a mistake to over-explain supernatural events. In a few stories in this volume, the story stops in its tracks, sometimes right in the middle of the horrifying events, in order for the author to offer a bogus explanation for the supernatural.
A good tale can be made out of making the other-worldly seem scientific, but this often requires a longer work than a short story, and a writer who has a genuinely interesting and semi-convincing explanation for events. Often it is better to give a few details and let the reader decide for themselves.
I won’t talk in detail about the individual stories here. There are too many to describe in detail, and perhaps it is more fun to read them for yourself than hear any kind of summary or analysis of each one.
We can argue about which authors were not included, or about the choice of tale that the editors made for an individual author. However, every editor is allowed to have their own personal favourites, and that should not reflect the bias of the reader.
What comes across here is that Wise and Fraser had a genuine love for tales of terror and the supernatural, and were just as comfortable with nineteenth-century authors as they were with contemporaries. From Poe to Lovecraft, the editors were willing to enjoy even the more visceral and dark tales of the modern age.
I did not like all the choices in the book, but I applaud the editors for offering such a wide and varied choice for me to sample.
October 17, 2011
Review: Murderous spouses, ancient curses, talking corpses, seductive ghostsover a thousand pages long, presenting 52 stories from 33 authors, this collection is massive and dated, halfway a historical fragment and halfway a resource, fascinating but deep enough to drown in. It's so vast that it's almost impossible to review: no single opinion can reflect so many stories. There are a few classics here, just as many minor offerings from famous authors, and plenty of forgettable selections. Half the joy is simply seeing what's included, because not all of these authors or stories would be considered genre nowand as such, this collection is a fascinating snapshot of the creation of canon and genre. The exclusions are also telling: there's only one vampire story because "these stories all tend to be very much alike" (760), and only three female authors (which seems to be a fault of the general climate more than the book's enthusiastic editors).
As pleasure reading is concerned, the introduction recommends slow going and I concur. Volumes like this are longterm bedside companions; try to hurry through them, and the stories become so many bricks in a wall. Classic horror has a different pace from modern horror, often finding an uneasy balance between atmospheric subtlety and heavy-handed themes such that it both bores and batters. But then along will come a story like Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" with its haunting, insidious beauty, or Lovecraft's superbly crafted imaginings of the unknown, or even Blackwood's tales, deeply flawed but rewarding patience with fantastic atmosphere. There are also authors and stories which helped create the genre but are now forgotten, and pleasant surprises such as Benson's skin-crawling "Caterpillars." There's more emphasis on action than modern readers may expect, and a sprinkling of gallows humor. There are too many duds to recommend it to a casual reader, and the selections are too arbitrary to make it the only classic horror anthology you own, but Great Tales is often fascinating and occasionally great fun. It's an enjoyable, if random, overview for fans of the genre, and I loved it. To my surprise, the anthology is still in printso if you stumble upon it, I well recommend you pick it up and read a few tales.
As pleasure reading is concerned, the introduction recommends slow going and I concur. Volumes like this are longterm bedside companions; try to hurry through them, and the stories become so many bricks in a wall. Classic horror has a different pace from modern horror, often finding an uneasy balance between atmospheric subtlety and heavy-handed themes such that it both bores and batters. But then along will come a story like Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" with its haunting, insidious beauty, or Lovecraft's superbly crafted imaginings of the unknown, or even Blackwood's tales, deeply flawed but rewarding patience with fantastic atmosphere. There are also authors and stories which helped create the genre but are now forgotten, and pleasant surprises such as Benson's skin-crawling "Caterpillars." There's more emphasis on action than modern readers may expect, and a sprinkling of gallows humor. There are too many duds to recommend it to a casual reader, and the selections are too arbitrary to make it the only classic horror anthology you own, but Great Tales is often fascinating and occasionally great fun. It's an enjoyable, if random, overview for fans of the genre, and I loved it. To my surprise, the anthology is still in printso if you stumble upon it, I well recommend you pick it up and read a few tales.
September 13, 2023
Contiene 52 relatos cortos de autores europeos y norteamericanos. La mayoría precedidos por una corta y util introducción. No los he leído todos, sino una selección de doce. Algunos son verdaderas joyas, como "The Horla" and What is a Dream de Mupassant o "They" de Kipling, pero otros son completamente irrelevantes, como "The Celestial Omnibus" de Forster.
1.Poe: “The Black Cat” (1843): ya lo había leído;
2.Poe: “The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar” (1845): ya lo había leído y me parece uno de los mejores relatos de Edgar Allan Poe;
3.Ambrose Bierce: “The Boarded Window” (1891): disfruté de su lectura en inglés, aunque no entiendo cómo en esta selección no se incluyó en su lugar "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", que es una obra maestra;
4.H.G.Wells: “Pollock and the Porroh Man” (1897). Leído en inglés y en castellano: un buen relato, sin más.
5.H.G.Wells: “The Sea Raiders” (1897). Leído en castellano: este me gustó más que el anterior, crea tensión y miedo en el lector.
6.Dickens: “The Trial for Murder” (1866). Leído en inglés: sin parecerme excepcional, me gustó esta historia de fantasmas pues está muy bien escrita;
7.Henry James: “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891). Leído en inglés: un poco pesado y sin mayor interés;
8.Maupassant: “The Horla” (1887). Leído en castellano: una pequeña obra maestra;
9.Maupassant: “Was it a Dream?” ("La muerta") (1887). Leído en castellano y en inglés: otra absoluta obra maestra con un final sorprendente, moralizante y espléndido;
10.Kipling: “The Return of Imray” (1891). Leído en inglés: bien, sin más;
11.Kipling: “They” (1904). Leído en castellano y en inglés: un relato exquisito, tanto en su prosa como en su desarrollo narrativo;
12.E.M.Forster: “The Celestial Omnibus” (1911). Leído en inglés: una historia bastante estúpida que situo entre El mago de Oz y Harry Potter.
1.Poe: “The Black Cat” (1843): ya lo había leído;
2.Poe: “The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar” (1845): ya lo había leído y me parece uno de los mejores relatos de Edgar Allan Poe;
3.Ambrose Bierce: “The Boarded Window” (1891): disfruté de su lectura en inglés, aunque no entiendo cómo en esta selección no se incluyó en su lugar "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", que es una obra maestra;
4.H.G.Wells: “Pollock and the Porroh Man” (1897). Leído en inglés y en castellano: un buen relato, sin más.
5.H.G.Wells: “The Sea Raiders” (1897). Leído en castellano: este me gustó más que el anterior, crea tensión y miedo en el lector.
6.Dickens: “The Trial for Murder” (1866). Leído en inglés: sin parecerme excepcional, me gustó esta historia de fantasmas pues está muy bien escrita;
7.Henry James: “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891). Leído en inglés: un poco pesado y sin mayor interés;
8.Maupassant: “The Horla” (1887). Leído en castellano: una pequeña obra maestra;
9.Maupassant: “Was it a Dream?” ("La muerta") (1887). Leído en castellano y en inglés: otra absoluta obra maestra con un final sorprendente, moralizante y espléndido;
10.Kipling: “The Return of Imray” (1891). Leído en inglés: bien, sin más;
11.Kipling: “They” (1904). Leído en castellano y en inglés: un relato exquisito, tanto en su prosa como en su desarrollo narrativo;
12.E.M.Forster: “The Celestial Omnibus” (1911). Leído en inglés: una historia bastante estúpida que situo entre El mago de Oz y Harry Potter.
April 27, 2024
4.52⭐
Introduction • essay by Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise 4.5⭐
Introduction to the Notes • essay by Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise ✔
TALES OF TERROR:
La Grande Bretêche • (1944) • Honoré de Balzac 4⭐
The Black Cat • (1843) • Edgar Allan Poe 5⭐
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar • (1845) • Edgar Allan Poe 5⭐
A Terribly Strange Bed • (1852) • Wilkie Collins 3.5⭐
The Boarded Window • (1889) • Ambrose Bierce 4⭐
The Three Strangers • (1883) • Thomas Hardy 4⭐
The Interruption • (1925) • W. W. Jacobs 5⭐
Pollock and the Porroh Man • (1895) • H. G. Wells 5⭐
The Sea Raiders • (1896) • H. G. Wells 5⭐
Sredni Vashtar • (1910) • Saki 5⭐
Moonlight Sonata • (1931) • Alexander Woollcott 4⭐
Silent Snow, Secret Snow • (1932) • Conrad Aiken 5⭐
Suspicion • (1933) • Dorothy L. Sayers 4.5⭐
The Most Dangerous Game • (1924) • Richard Connell 5⭐
Leiningen Versus the Ants • (1938) • Carl Stephenson 4⭐
The Gentleman from America • (1924) • Michael Arlen 4⭐
A Rose for Emily • (1930) • William Faulkner 5⭐
The Killers • (1927) • Ernest Hemingway 5⭐
Back for Christmas • (1939) • John Collier 4⭐
TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL:
Taboo • (1939) • Geoffrey Household 4.5⭐
The Haunters and the Haunted: or, The House and the Brain • (1859) Edward Bulwer-Lytton 5⭐
Rappaccini's Daughter • [Rappaccini • 1] • (1844) • Nathaniel Hawthorne 5⭐
The Trial for Murder • (1928) • Charles Allston Collins and Charles Dickens 3.25⭐
Green Tea • [Martin Hesselius] • (1869) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 3.5⭐
What Was It? • [Harry Escott] • (1859) • Fitz-James O'Brien 4⭐
Sir Edmund Orme • (1891) • Henry James 4⭐
The Horla, or Modern Ghosts • [Le Horla • 3] • (1887) • Guy de Maupassant 5⭐
Was It a Dream? • (1887) • Guy de Maupassant 5⭐
The Screaming Skull • (1908) • F. Marion Crawford 4.25⭐
The Furnished Room • (1904) • O. Henry 4⭐
Casting the Runes • (1911) • M. R. James 5⭐
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad • (1944) • M. R. James 4⭐
Afterward • (1910) • Edith Wharton 5⭐
The Monkey's Paw • (1902) • W. W. Jacobs 5⭐
The Great God Pan • (1894) • Arthur Machen 5⭐
How Love Came to Professor Guildea • (1897) • Robert Hichens 4.25⭐
The Return of Imray • (1891) • Rudyard Kipling 3.5⭐
"They" • (1904) • Rudyard Kipling 4⭐
Lukundoo • (1925) • Edward Lucas White 3.75⭐
Caterpillars • (1912) • E. F. Benson 5⭐
Mrs. Amworth • (1922) • E. F. Benson 5⭐
Ancient Sorceries • [John Silence] • (1908) • Algernon Blackwood 4⭐
Confession • (1921) • Algernon Blackwood and Wilfred Wilson 4.5⭐
The Open Window • (1911) • Saki 5⭐
The Beckoning Fair One • (1911) • Oliver Onions 5⭐
Out of the Deep • (1923) • Walter de la Mare 3.5⭐
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me • (1921) • A. E. Coppard 3.25⭐
The Celestial Omnibus • (1908) • E. M. Forster 4.25⭐
The Ghost Ship • (1912) • Richard Middleton 4⭐
The Sailor-Boy's Tale • (1942) • Karen Blixen [as by Isak Dinesen] 3.5⭐
The Rats in the Walls • (1924) • H. P. Lovecraft 5⭐
The Dunwich Horror • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1929) • H. P. Lovecraft 5⭐
Introduction • essay by Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise 4.5⭐
Introduction to the Notes • essay by Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise ✔
TALES OF TERROR:
La Grande Bretêche • (1944) • Honoré de Balzac 4⭐
The Black Cat • (1843) • Edgar Allan Poe 5⭐
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar • (1845) • Edgar Allan Poe 5⭐
A Terribly Strange Bed • (1852) • Wilkie Collins 3.5⭐
The Boarded Window • (1889) • Ambrose Bierce 4⭐
The Three Strangers • (1883) • Thomas Hardy 4⭐
The Interruption • (1925) • W. W. Jacobs 5⭐
Pollock and the Porroh Man • (1895) • H. G. Wells 5⭐
The Sea Raiders • (1896) • H. G. Wells 5⭐
Sredni Vashtar • (1910) • Saki 5⭐
Moonlight Sonata • (1931) • Alexander Woollcott 4⭐
Silent Snow, Secret Snow • (1932) • Conrad Aiken 5⭐
Suspicion • (1933) • Dorothy L. Sayers 4.5⭐
The Most Dangerous Game • (1924) • Richard Connell 5⭐
Leiningen Versus the Ants • (1938) • Carl Stephenson 4⭐
The Gentleman from America • (1924) • Michael Arlen 4⭐
A Rose for Emily • (1930) • William Faulkner 5⭐
The Killers • (1927) • Ernest Hemingway 5⭐
Back for Christmas • (1939) • John Collier 4⭐
TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL:
Taboo • (1939) • Geoffrey Household 4.5⭐
The Haunters and the Haunted: or, The House and the Brain • (1859) Edward Bulwer-Lytton 5⭐
Rappaccini's Daughter • [Rappaccini • 1] • (1844) • Nathaniel Hawthorne 5⭐
The Trial for Murder • (1928) • Charles Allston Collins and Charles Dickens 3.25⭐
Green Tea • [Martin Hesselius] • (1869) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 3.5⭐
What Was It? • [Harry Escott] • (1859) • Fitz-James O'Brien 4⭐
Sir Edmund Orme • (1891) • Henry James 4⭐
The Horla, or Modern Ghosts • [Le Horla • 3] • (1887) • Guy de Maupassant 5⭐
Was It a Dream? • (1887) • Guy de Maupassant 5⭐
The Screaming Skull • (1908) • F. Marion Crawford 4.25⭐
The Furnished Room • (1904) • O. Henry 4⭐
Casting the Runes • (1911) • M. R. James 5⭐
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad • (1944) • M. R. James 4⭐
Afterward • (1910) • Edith Wharton 5⭐
The Monkey's Paw • (1902) • W. W. Jacobs 5⭐
The Great God Pan • (1894) • Arthur Machen 5⭐
How Love Came to Professor Guildea • (1897) • Robert Hichens 4.25⭐
The Return of Imray • (1891) • Rudyard Kipling 3.5⭐
"They" • (1904) • Rudyard Kipling 4⭐
Lukundoo • (1925) • Edward Lucas White 3.75⭐
Caterpillars • (1912) • E. F. Benson 5⭐
Mrs. Amworth • (1922) • E. F. Benson 5⭐
Ancient Sorceries • [John Silence] • (1908) • Algernon Blackwood 4⭐
Confession • (1921) • Algernon Blackwood and Wilfred Wilson 4.5⭐
The Open Window • (1911) • Saki 5⭐
The Beckoning Fair One • (1911) • Oliver Onions 5⭐
Out of the Deep • (1923) • Walter de la Mare 3.5⭐
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me • (1921) • A. E. Coppard 3.25⭐
The Celestial Omnibus • (1908) • E. M. Forster 4.25⭐
The Ghost Ship • (1912) • Richard Middleton 4⭐
The Sailor-Boy's Tale • (1942) • Karen Blixen [as by Isak Dinesen] 3.5⭐
The Rats in the Walls • (1924) • H. P. Lovecraft 5⭐
The Dunwich Horror • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1929) • H. P. Lovecraft 5⭐
October 10, 2018
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural: This book had many, many weak stories in it that I'd just as soon not have to Wade through. There were a few goodies, though, and I note them here.
La Grande Breteche, Honore de Balzac
4 🌟
Shades of "The Cask of Amontillado" EAP
The Black Cat, EAP
4 🌟
An alcoholic takes out the black mood of his debauchery on his pets and his sweet-tempered wife. But there's always the KARMIC court, where the court of humans would fail.
The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar, EAP
4 🌟
A hypnotist tries the experiment of putting a man who is dying into a trance, minutes before his death. Truly gross.
A Terribly Strange Bed, Wilkie Collins
3 🌟
I have never been into gambling; I'm too poor to give my money away. This story is about an Englishman who goes to a mero-mero french gambling house and wins big. To celebrate, he gets drunk. We all know that nothing good can happen next.
The Three Strangers, Thomas Hardy
3 🌟
A case of mistaken identity. When you throw a party, you can often expect to have gate-crashers, and these are usually the most thirsty and hungry of the guests.
Pollock and the Porroh Man, H.G.Wells
4 🌟
A racist in Sierra Leone has an argument with a Porroh Man, with a deadly conclusion. Hallucinations take over the racist's world.
Sredni Vashtar, Saki
4 🌟
A boy orphan has a wicked cousin for a guardian. His only friends in the world are a ferret and a hen, in a toolshed in the garden. Wicked cousin takes away his hen. When wicked cousin would take away the ferret, too, Sredni Vashtar grants the victim his wish.
Back for Christmas, John Collier
4 🌟
How appropriate that the author is named Collier. An English doctor with an over-managing wife, is to lecture for three months in the U.S. Before they left, the doctor had been excavating a hole for a wine cellar, but his wife promised all their friends"We'll be back by Christmas." The hole wasn't for wine.
Taboo, Geoffrey Household
3 🌟
I like this story for the subject matter. It's about a werewolf, in a small village in Eastern Europe. But I don't care for stories about werewolves.
Was it a Dream?, Guy de Maupassant
3 🌟
Someone You knew died. You know that person was a total asshole, but the obituary tells another story. Did you ever wonder if the dead feel like correcting those epitaphs?
Afterward, Edith Wharton
4 🌟
People who are wealthy often get that way by stepping on someone else, or many other people. They don't like to be reminded of who they hurt in order to Live their lavish "I'm important" lifestyle. But there're forces keeping track of such hurts, that our limited senses can't sense, until"afterward."
The Monkey's Paw, W.W.Jacobs
4 🌟
Somebody in India cut off a Monkey's hand. A spell was put on it to grant 3 humans 3 wishes. The first man to utilize the wishes, used the 3rd one to wish for death. An old English couple are the 3rd, and last, humans to benefit from the Monkey's dismemberment.
How Love Came to Professor Guildea, Robert Hichens
4 🌟
A scientist and a priest strike up an unlikely friendship. The priest is all about love of mankind, while the professor feels loathe at the thought of someone or something loving him. Something comes to love the professor as if in answer to his profress.
Lukundoo, Edward Lucas White
5 🌟
White explorers are traveling through parts of Africa, searching out pygmies (!?) when they are visited by a member of another white explorers group whose leader is sick. He asks them to return with him to help his chief. His chief is sick with something like carbuncles. Lukundoo means witchcraft. A truly creepy story.
Caterpillars, E.F.Benson
5 🌟
When I was a kid, I thought cancer was contagious. In this story, it is.
The Beckoning Fair One, Oliver Onions
3 🌟
An author is working on a second book, due in October, when he feels the urge to move residence to a flat in a house. There is a mesmerizing effect in the house that causes him to cease working on his novel, and become a recluse. Moreover, his woman friend, trying to look after him, is mysteriously attacked if she tries to enter the house.
The Celestial Omnibus, E.M.Forster
5 🌟
In a suburb of London, there lived a little, neglected boy. Though he was surrounded with luxury, he was starved. One day, he discovered an Omnibus route that travelled to Heaven.
This story is a lesson to the people who will take themselves so seriously, caring only for how they can impress their fellow human beings, who look down on those who appear simple and uneducated to their"venerable" selves. This story's lesson is that a simple life, but one that finds heaven in every leaf, every flower, is the true, and blessed life.
The writing in this story is lovely, and conveys a magical feeling.
The Ghost Ship, Richard Middleton
4 🌟
A village in England is full of ghosts, and the villagers and the ghosts exist together peacefully. But in 1897, a huge storm blows up, and a Ghost Ship, by its strength, is blown 50 miles from Sea, into the landlord's of the Inn turnip field. The captain is most amiable, when the landlord and the narrator go to complain about ruining the turnips, and gives the landlord's wife a gold brooch, by way of paying for her crushed turnips. The captain, though, for all his amiability, has a bad influence on the young ghosts of the town.
A light-hearted, amusing story from an author who suffered so badly from depression that he chloroformed himself to death at the age of 29. :-(
The Sailor-boy's Tale, Isak Dineson
4 🌟
This story has a moral to it: Be kind to animals and insects; not just humans. With our limited senses, we don't have the knowledge to know that they are so much more important than humans.
The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, H.P.Lovecraft
3 🌟
I can't really explain HPL's appeal to me. You read his stories, and sometimes they seem so hokey. But I remember our limited human senses, and I think about Lovecraft, writing in his study, or wherever, and of his striving to explain and explore a world of beings beyond our senses. My favorite is"The Mountains of Madness."
La Grande Breteche, Honore de Balzac
4 🌟
Shades of "The Cask of Amontillado" EAP
The Black Cat, EAP
4 🌟
An alcoholic takes out the black mood of his debauchery on his pets and his sweet-tempered wife. But there's always the KARMIC court, where the court of humans would fail.
The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar, EAP
4 🌟
A hypnotist tries the experiment of putting a man who is dying into a trance, minutes before his death. Truly gross.
A Terribly Strange Bed, Wilkie Collins
3 🌟
I have never been into gambling; I'm too poor to give my money away. This story is about an Englishman who goes to a mero-mero french gambling house and wins big. To celebrate, he gets drunk. We all know that nothing good can happen next.
The Three Strangers, Thomas Hardy
3 🌟
A case of mistaken identity. When you throw a party, you can often expect to have gate-crashers, and these are usually the most thirsty and hungry of the guests.
Pollock and the Porroh Man, H.G.Wells
4 🌟
A racist in Sierra Leone has an argument with a Porroh Man, with a deadly conclusion. Hallucinations take over the racist's world.
Sredni Vashtar, Saki
4 🌟
A boy orphan has a wicked cousin for a guardian. His only friends in the world are a ferret and a hen, in a toolshed in the garden. Wicked cousin takes away his hen. When wicked cousin would take away the ferret, too, Sredni Vashtar grants the victim his wish.
Back for Christmas, John Collier
4 🌟
How appropriate that the author is named Collier. An English doctor with an over-managing wife, is to lecture for three months in the U.S. Before they left, the doctor had been excavating a hole for a wine cellar, but his wife promised all their friends"We'll be back by Christmas." The hole wasn't for wine.
Taboo, Geoffrey Household
3 🌟
I like this story for the subject matter. It's about a werewolf, in a small village in Eastern Europe. But I don't care for stories about werewolves.
Was it a Dream?, Guy de Maupassant
3 🌟
Someone You knew died. You know that person was a total asshole, but the obituary tells another story. Did you ever wonder if the dead feel like correcting those epitaphs?
Afterward, Edith Wharton
4 🌟
People who are wealthy often get that way by stepping on someone else, or many other people. They don't like to be reminded of who they hurt in order to Live their lavish "I'm important" lifestyle. But there're forces keeping track of such hurts, that our limited senses can't sense, until"afterward."
The Monkey's Paw, W.W.Jacobs
4 🌟
Somebody in India cut off a Monkey's hand. A spell was put on it to grant 3 humans 3 wishes. The first man to utilize the wishes, used the 3rd one to wish for death. An old English couple are the 3rd, and last, humans to benefit from the Monkey's dismemberment.
How Love Came to Professor Guildea, Robert Hichens
4 🌟
A scientist and a priest strike up an unlikely friendship. The priest is all about love of mankind, while the professor feels loathe at the thought of someone or something loving him. Something comes to love the professor as if in answer to his profress.
Lukundoo, Edward Lucas White
5 🌟
White explorers are traveling through parts of Africa, searching out pygmies (!?) when they are visited by a member of another white explorers group whose leader is sick. He asks them to return with him to help his chief. His chief is sick with something like carbuncles. Lukundoo means witchcraft. A truly creepy story.
Caterpillars, E.F.Benson
5 🌟
When I was a kid, I thought cancer was contagious. In this story, it is.
The Beckoning Fair One, Oliver Onions
3 🌟
An author is working on a second book, due in October, when he feels the urge to move residence to a flat in a house. There is a mesmerizing effect in the house that causes him to cease working on his novel, and become a recluse. Moreover, his woman friend, trying to look after him, is mysteriously attacked if she tries to enter the house.
The Celestial Omnibus, E.M.Forster
5 🌟
In a suburb of London, there lived a little, neglected boy. Though he was surrounded with luxury, he was starved. One day, he discovered an Omnibus route that travelled to Heaven.
This story is a lesson to the people who will take themselves so seriously, caring only for how they can impress their fellow human beings, who look down on those who appear simple and uneducated to their"venerable" selves. This story's lesson is that a simple life, but one that finds heaven in every leaf, every flower, is the true, and blessed life.
The writing in this story is lovely, and conveys a magical feeling.
The Ghost Ship, Richard Middleton
4 🌟
A village in England is full of ghosts, and the villagers and the ghosts exist together peacefully. But in 1897, a huge storm blows up, and a Ghost Ship, by its strength, is blown 50 miles from Sea, into the landlord's of the Inn turnip field. The captain is most amiable, when the landlord and the narrator go to complain about ruining the turnips, and gives the landlord's wife a gold brooch, by way of paying for her crushed turnips. The captain, though, for all his amiability, has a bad influence on the young ghosts of the town.
A light-hearted, amusing story from an author who suffered so badly from depression that he chloroformed himself to death at the age of 29. :-(
The Sailor-boy's Tale, Isak Dineson
4 🌟
This story has a moral to it: Be kind to animals and insects; not just humans. With our limited senses, we don't have the knowledge to know that they are so much more important than humans.
The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, H.P.Lovecraft
3 🌟
I can't really explain HPL's appeal to me. You read his stories, and sometimes they seem so hokey. But I remember our limited human senses, and I think about Lovecraft, writing in his study, or wherever, and of his striving to explain and explore a world of beings beyond our senses. My favorite is"The Mountains of Madness."
February 22, 2009
Beautiful words, not very gory. It makes you realize the difference between schlock writers and true artists who can convey a mood with a few well chosen phrases. I loved it - one of the few books I won't lend out to friends. I can't afford to lose it! I've also ordered books by some of the best authors in the anthology.
June 24, 2011
This anthology is the best among all the collections available in the market which claims about having most of the best ghost & horror stories inside their covers. Simply the list of contents would be enough to make lovers of ghost stories gasp in delight, and when you combine the contents with a very-very reasonable price, you have to run for it! Most highly recommended.
June 25, 2017
A fantastic (in multiple senses) collection of horror, both supernatural and psychological. This Modern Library anthology is a classic for a reason; and while not every story is five stars, a surprisingly high number of them are. I like how this isn't all ghost stories, but has a good mix of different takes on horror, terror, the supernatural, and the mysterious. It stretches from the early/mid-nineteenth century (Balzac, Poe, Hawthorne) to its original publication date (1944), and includes some essential stories by the likes of Algernon Blackwood ("Ancient Sorceries" and "Confession"), M.R. James ("Casting the Runes" and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"), Arthur Machen ("The Great God Pan"), H.P. Lovecraft ("The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror"), and dozens of others. Highly recommended.
February 15, 2020
Ever since I read this anthology (which is one of the best of its kind), I’ve been imaging a counterfactual scenario: What if Phyllis Fraser and Herbert A. Wise had put out a sequel, say ten or fifteen years later? What stories would they include?
So of course then I had to fantasy-edit my own hypothetical anthology. The rules are that the stories must be consonant in tone with those in the original, and have been published in the 1950s or earlier. The original anthology had 52 stories and one poem, so this does as well; assembled in alphabetical order (although I didn’t divide the supernatural from the terror, as my edition of the Fraser did). My anthology:
1. Ryunosuke Akutagawa, A Christian Death
2. William Beckford, The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah
3. Tristan Bernard, The Exile
4. Ambrose Bierce, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
5. James Blish, There Shall Be No Darkness
6. Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
7. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
8. Truman Capote, House of Flowers
9. Robert W. Chambers, The Yellow Sign
10. Robert P. Tristram Coffin, The Ballad of Cap’n Pye
11. F. Marion Crawford, For the Blood Is the Life
12. Roald Dahl, Beware of the Dog
13. Roald Dahl, Poison
14. C.S. Forester, Hornblower and the Even Chance
15. Jacques Futrelle, The Problem of Cell 13
16. Robert Graves, The Shout
17. Graham Greene, All but Empty
18. Edmund Hamilton, The Monster-God of Mamruth
19. Nathaniel Hawthorn, Young Goodman Brown
20. Johann Peter Hebel, An Unexpected Reunion
21. George Hitchcock, An Invitation to the Hunt
22. Robert E. Howard, Pigeons from Hell
23. Washington Irving, The Spectre Bridegroom
24. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
25. Shirley Jackson, The Summer People
26. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China
27. Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
28. Damon Knight, To Serve Man
29. Fritz Leiber, You’re All Alone
30. Maurice Level, A Madman
31. Jack London, A Relic of the Pleistocene
32. Jack London, To Build a Fire
33. H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth
34. Arthur Machen, The Novel of the White Powder
35. Richard Matheson, Legion of Plotters
36. Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice
37. Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado
38. Frederik Pohl, The Tunnel under the World
39. Aleksandr Pushkin, The Shot
40. John Russell, The Fourth Man
41. Saki, The Interlopers
42. Sapper, The Idol’s Eye
43. Mary Shelley, The Mortal Immortal
44. Clark Ashton Smith, The Venus of Azombeii
45. John Steinbeck, The Affair at 7, rue de M——
46. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Body Snatcher
47. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp
48. Frank R. Stockton, The Lady or the Tiger
49. Hernando Téllez, Just Lather, That’s All
50. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
51. Hugh Walpole, Mrs. Lunt
52. Stanley Weyman, The King’s Stratagem
53. Adolf Wenig, The Young Man Who Served in Hell
So of course then I had to fantasy-edit my own hypothetical anthology. The rules are that the stories must be consonant in tone with those in the original, and have been published in the 1950s or earlier. The original anthology had 52 stories and one poem, so this does as well; assembled in alphabetical order (although I didn’t divide the supernatural from the terror, as my edition of the Fraser did). My anthology:
1. Ryunosuke Akutagawa, A Christian Death
2. William Beckford, The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah
3. Tristan Bernard, The Exile
4. Ambrose Bierce, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
5. James Blish, There Shall Be No Darkness
6. Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
7. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
8. Truman Capote, House of Flowers
9. Robert W. Chambers, The Yellow Sign
10. Robert P. Tristram Coffin, The Ballad of Cap’n Pye
11. F. Marion Crawford, For the Blood Is the Life
12. Roald Dahl, Beware of the Dog
13. Roald Dahl, Poison
14. C.S. Forester, Hornblower and the Even Chance
15. Jacques Futrelle, The Problem of Cell 13
16. Robert Graves, The Shout
17. Graham Greene, All but Empty
18. Edmund Hamilton, The Monster-God of Mamruth
19. Nathaniel Hawthorn, Young Goodman Brown
20. Johann Peter Hebel, An Unexpected Reunion
21. George Hitchcock, An Invitation to the Hunt
22. Robert E. Howard, Pigeons from Hell
23. Washington Irving, The Spectre Bridegroom
24. Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
25. Shirley Jackson, The Summer People
26. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China
27. Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
28. Damon Knight, To Serve Man
29. Fritz Leiber, You’re All Alone
30. Maurice Level, A Madman
31. Jack London, A Relic of the Pleistocene
32. Jack London, To Build a Fire
33. H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth
34. Arthur Machen, The Novel of the White Powder
35. Richard Matheson, Legion of Plotters
36. Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice
37. Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado
38. Frederik Pohl, The Tunnel under the World
39. Aleksandr Pushkin, The Shot
40. John Russell, The Fourth Man
41. Saki, The Interlopers
42. Sapper, The Idol’s Eye
43. Mary Shelley, The Mortal Immortal
44. Clark Ashton Smith, The Venus of Azombeii
45. John Steinbeck, The Affair at 7, rue de M——
46. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Body Snatcher
47. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp
48. Frank R. Stockton, The Lady or the Tiger
49. Hernando Téllez, Just Lather, That’s All
50. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
51. Hugh Walpole, Mrs. Lunt
52. Stanley Weyman, The King’s Stratagem
53. Adolf Wenig, The Young Man Who Served in Hell
September 7, 2010
In some respects, perhaps this collection is not the best thing to read in before retiring to sleep; but I found it admirably suited to the purpose, and did not have any more disturbing dreams than I usually have. All of the stories are wonderfully creepy, and I thoroughly enjoyed the reading of them.
The edition I possess (and read) is a reprint (dated 1972) of a work that was published in 1944; that did not not make the stories included any the less valuable, although it did exclude any stories written by Stephen King (born in 1947). It was odd, though, to see in some of the capsule biographies such authors as H. G. Wells, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, E. M. Forester, and Isak Dinesen all being referred to in the present sense. The Introduction also contains some very out of date musings; “When did the dread of the supernatural first arise? . . . there were probably dragons and vicious demons – racial memories of an earlier age, with its bloody tyrannosaurus and its creatures still more ape-like than our own primitive ancestors.”
My only real complaint with the book is that, for reasons best known to the Editors, the first 280 pages are devoted to Tales of Terror (in chronological order, by author birth date), and the remaining 800 pages are devoted to Tales of the Supernatural (again in chronological order, by author birth date). While I admit that the Tales of Terror do not have any ghost stories, it seemed to me to be an artificial construct to divide the stories in such a way.
Having said all that, this is a great collection, including such tales as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken, “Was It A Dream?” by Guy de Maupassant, “Casting the Runes” and “Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad” by M. R. James, “Confession” by Algernon Blackwood, “The Celestial Omnibus” by E. M. Forester, “The Ghost Ship” by Richard Middleton, and “The Rats In The Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft. And I can say that these were my favorite stories, and that I am happy to have this book to keep as my very own.
The edition I possess (and read) is a reprint (dated 1972) of a work that was published in 1944; that did not not make the stories included any the less valuable, although it did exclude any stories written by Stephen King (born in 1947). It was odd, though, to see in some of the capsule biographies such authors as H. G. Wells, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, E. M. Forester, and Isak Dinesen all being referred to in the present sense. The Introduction also contains some very out of date musings; “When did the dread of the supernatural first arise? . . . there were probably dragons and vicious demons – racial memories of an earlier age, with its bloody tyrannosaurus and its creatures still more ape-like than our own primitive ancestors.”
My only real complaint with the book is that, for reasons best known to the Editors, the first 280 pages are devoted to Tales of Terror (in chronological order, by author birth date), and the remaining 800 pages are devoted to Tales of the Supernatural (again in chronological order, by author birth date). While I admit that the Tales of Terror do not have any ghost stories, it seemed to me to be an artificial construct to divide the stories in such a way.
Having said all that, this is a great collection, including such tales as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken, “Was It A Dream?” by Guy de Maupassant, “Casting the Runes” and “Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad” by M. R. James, “Confession” by Algernon Blackwood, “The Celestial Omnibus” by E. M. Forester, “The Ghost Ship” by Richard Middleton, and “The Rats In The Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft. And I can say that these were my favorite stories, and that I am happy to have this book to keep as my very own.
May 2, 2016
This is a big book of old-timey stories about ghosts and other bizarre supernatural stuff, including a few classics like The Most Dangerous Game and The Monkey's Paw. Most of these stories are more strange than scary, but I found them all pretty fascinating. One that stands out in my memory: Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White. (Whoa! That story!)
Giving this five stars because it's a great collection of all sorts of dark weirdness.
Giving this five stars because it's a great collection of all sorts of dark weirdness.
May 30, 2010
Thanks be to Google. I think I've identified this title as an anthology much-beloved in my childhood. This is old fashioned psychological horror, creepy and disturbing rather than gory. I loved The Great God Pan, Casting the Runes and Sredni Vashtar. Now to pay my respects to Amazon!
February 24, 2008
This is a fantastic collection of suspense/horror stories from the twentieth century. If you like horror and suspense, and you just don't have all day to sit around reading books, get this collection of tales.
April 19, 2011
Favorite stories:
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad
The Beckoning Fair One
What Was It?
The Horla
The Screaming Skull
Afterward
The Dunwich Horror
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad
The Beckoning Fair One
What Was It?
The Horla
The Screaming Skull
Afterward
The Dunwich Horror
July 29, 2007
Has a good mix of short stories from the well recognized authors, and some that may surprise you.
November 14, 2022
Great Tales of Terror the Supernatural is a great collection of stories. It makes for a highly enjoyable read.
Title: Great Tales of Terror the Supernatural
Editors: Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser
Year: 1944
Genre: Fiction - Short story anthology, horror
Page count: 1,080 pages
Date(s) read: 10/22/2-11/14/22
Reading journal entry #302 in 2022
The contents:
Aiken, Conrad
Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Arlen, Michael
The Gentleman from America
Balzac, Honoré de
La Grande Breteche
Benson, E. F.
Mrs. Amworth
Benson, E. F.
Caterpillars
Bierce, Ambrose
The Boarded Window
Blackwood, Algernon
Ancient Sorceries
Blackwood, Algernon
Confession
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward
The Haunters and the Haunted; or, The House and the Brain
Collier, John
Back for Christmas
Collins, Charles Allston & Dickens, Charles
The Trial for Murder
Collins, Wilkie
A Terribly Strange Bed
Connell, Richard
The Most Dangerous Game
Coppard, A. E
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Crawford, F. Marion
The Screaming Skull
de la Mare, Walter
Out of the Deep
de Maupassant, Guy
The Horla; or, Modern Ghosts
de Maupassant, Guy
Was It a Dream?
Dinesen, Isak
The Sailor-Boy's Tale
Faulkner, William
A Rose for Emily
Forster, E. M
The Celestial Omnibus
Hardy, Thomas
The Three Strangers
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Rappaccini's Daughter
Hemingway, Ernest
The Killers
Henry, O.
The Furnished Room
Hichens, Robert
How Love Came to Professor Guildea
Household, Geoffrey
Taboo
Jacobs, W. W.
The Interruption
Jacobs, W. W.
The Monkey's Paw
James, Henry
Sir Edmund Orme
James, M. R
Casting the Runes
James, M. R
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad
Kipling, Rudyard
The Return of Imray
Kipling, Rudyard
The Return of the Children
Kipling, Rudyard
"They"
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
Green Tea
Lovecraft, H. P.
The Rats in the Walls
Lovecraft, H. P.
The Dunwich Horror
Machen, Arthur
The Great God Pan
Middleton, Richard
The Ghost Ship
O'Brien, Fitz-James
What Was It?
Onions, Oliver
The Beckoning Fair One
Poe, Edgar Allan
The Black Cat
Poe, Edgar Allan
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Saki
Sredni Vashtar
Saki
The Open Window
Sayers, Dorothy L.
Suspicion
Stephenson, Carl
Leiningen versus the Ants
Wells, H. G.
Pollock and the Porroh Man
Wells, H. G.
The Sea Raiders
Wharton, Edith
Afterward
White, Edward Lucas
Lukundoo
Woollcott, Alexander
Moonlight Sonata
Title: Great Tales of Terror the Supernatural
Editors: Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser
Year: 1944
Genre: Fiction - Short story anthology, horror
Page count: 1,080 pages
Date(s) read: 10/22/2-11/14/22
Reading journal entry #302 in 2022
The contents:
Aiken, Conrad
Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Arlen, Michael
The Gentleman from America
Balzac, Honoré de
La Grande Breteche
Benson, E. F.
Mrs. Amworth
Benson, E. F.
Caterpillars
Bierce, Ambrose
The Boarded Window
Blackwood, Algernon
Ancient Sorceries
Blackwood, Algernon
Confession
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward
The Haunters and the Haunted; or, The House and the Brain
Collier, John
Back for Christmas
Collins, Charles Allston & Dickens, Charles
The Trial for Murder
Collins, Wilkie
A Terribly Strange Bed
Connell, Richard
The Most Dangerous Game
Coppard, A. E
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Crawford, F. Marion
The Screaming Skull
de la Mare, Walter
Out of the Deep
de Maupassant, Guy
The Horla; or, Modern Ghosts
de Maupassant, Guy
Was It a Dream?
Dinesen, Isak
The Sailor-Boy's Tale
Faulkner, William
A Rose for Emily
Forster, E. M
The Celestial Omnibus
Hardy, Thomas
The Three Strangers
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Rappaccini's Daughter
Hemingway, Ernest
The Killers
Henry, O.
The Furnished Room
Hichens, Robert
How Love Came to Professor Guildea
Household, Geoffrey
Taboo
Jacobs, W. W.
The Interruption
Jacobs, W. W.
The Monkey's Paw
James, Henry
Sir Edmund Orme
James, M. R
Casting the Runes
James, M. R
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad
Kipling, Rudyard
The Return of Imray
Kipling, Rudyard
The Return of the Children
Kipling, Rudyard
"They"
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
Green Tea
Lovecraft, H. P.
The Rats in the Walls
Lovecraft, H. P.
The Dunwich Horror
Machen, Arthur
The Great God Pan
Middleton, Richard
The Ghost Ship
O'Brien, Fitz-James
What Was It?
Onions, Oliver
The Beckoning Fair One
Poe, Edgar Allan
The Black Cat
Poe, Edgar Allan
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Saki
Sredni Vashtar
Saki
The Open Window
Sayers, Dorothy L.
Suspicion
Stephenson, Carl
Leiningen versus the Ants
Wells, H. G.
Pollock and the Porroh Man
Wells, H. G.
The Sea Raiders
Wharton, Edith
Afterward
White, Edward Lucas
Lukundoo
Woollcott, Alexander
Moonlight Sonata
June 14, 2025
1. Honore de Balzac - La Grande Breteche - 9/10
2. Edgar Allan Poe - The Black cat - 7/10
3. Edgar Allan Poe - the facts in the case of M.Valdemar - 6/10
4. Wilkie Collins - A terribly strange bed - 7/10
5. Ambrose Bierce - A boarded window - 7/10
6. Thomas Hardy - The three Strangers - 6/10
7. W.W. Jacobs - The Interruption - 6/10
8. H.G. Wells - The Pollock and the Porroh Man - 4/10
9. H.G. Wells - Sea Raiders - 4/10
10. Saki - Sredni Vashtar - 6/10
11. Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata - 4/10
12. Konrad Aiken - Silent snow, Secret snow - 5/10
13. Dorothy L. Sayers - Suspicion - 5/10
14. Richard Connel - The most dangerous game - 6/10
15. Carl Stephenson - Leiningen versus the ants - 6/10
16. Michael Arlen - The Gentleman from America - 5/10
17. William Faulkner - Rose for Emily - 4/10
18. Ernest Hemingway - The Killers - 3/10
19. John Collier - Back for Christmas - 6/10
20. Geoffrey Household - Taboo - 6/10
21. Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Haunters and the Haunted or the House and the Brain - 7/10
22. Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter - 5/10
23. Charles Collins and Charles Dickens - The Trial for Murder - 3/10
24. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Green Tea - 4/10
25. Fitz-James O'brian - What was it? - 5/10
26. Henry James - Sir Edmund Orme - 3/10
27. Guy de Maupassant - The Horla - 7/10
28. Guy de Maupassant - Was it a dream? - 7/10
29. F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull - 4/10
30. O. Henry - The Furnished Room - 4/10
31. M.R. James - Casting the Runes - 6/10
32. M.R. James - Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to you my Lad - 6/10
33. Edith Wharton - Afterward - 3/10
34. W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey's Paw - 5/10
35. Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan - 7/10
36. Robert Hichens - How Love Came to Professor Guildea - 3/10
37. Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray - 4/10
38. Rudyard Kipling - "They" - 8/10
39. Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo - 7/10
40. E. F. Benson - Caterpillars - 6/10
41. E. F. Benson - Mrs. Amworth - 8/10
42. Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries - 2/10
43. Algernon Blackwood - Confession - 2/10
44. Saki - The Open Window - 5/10
45. Oliver Onions - The Beckoning fair One - 4/10
46. Walter de la Mare - Out of the Deep - 1/10
47. A. E. Coppard - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me - 2/10
48. E. M. Forster - The Celestial Omnibus - 3/10
49. Richard Middleton - The Ghost Ship - 4/10
50. Isak Dinesen - Sailor Boy's Tale - 5/10
51. H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls - 8/10
52. H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror - 9/10
2. Edgar Allan Poe - The Black cat - 7/10
3. Edgar Allan Poe - the facts in the case of M.Valdemar - 6/10
4. Wilkie Collins - A terribly strange bed - 7/10
5. Ambrose Bierce - A boarded window - 7/10
6. Thomas Hardy - The three Strangers - 6/10
7. W.W. Jacobs - The Interruption - 6/10
8. H.G. Wells - The Pollock and the Porroh Man - 4/10
9. H.G. Wells - Sea Raiders - 4/10
10. Saki - Sredni Vashtar - 6/10
11. Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata - 4/10
12. Konrad Aiken - Silent snow, Secret snow - 5/10
13. Dorothy L. Sayers - Suspicion - 5/10
14. Richard Connel - The most dangerous game - 6/10
15. Carl Stephenson - Leiningen versus the ants - 6/10
16. Michael Arlen - The Gentleman from America - 5/10
17. William Faulkner - Rose for Emily - 4/10
18. Ernest Hemingway - The Killers - 3/10
19. John Collier - Back for Christmas - 6/10
20. Geoffrey Household - Taboo - 6/10
21. Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Haunters and the Haunted or the House and the Brain - 7/10
22. Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter - 5/10
23. Charles Collins and Charles Dickens - The Trial for Murder - 3/10
24. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Green Tea - 4/10
25. Fitz-James O'brian - What was it? - 5/10
26. Henry James - Sir Edmund Orme - 3/10
27. Guy de Maupassant - The Horla - 7/10
28. Guy de Maupassant - Was it a dream? - 7/10
29. F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull - 4/10
30. O. Henry - The Furnished Room - 4/10
31. M.R. James - Casting the Runes - 6/10
32. M.R. James - Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to you my Lad - 6/10
33. Edith Wharton - Afterward - 3/10
34. W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey's Paw - 5/10
35. Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan - 7/10
36. Robert Hichens - How Love Came to Professor Guildea - 3/10
37. Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray - 4/10
38. Rudyard Kipling - "They" - 8/10
39. Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo - 7/10
40. E. F. Benson - Caterpillars - 6/10
41. E. F. Benson - Mrs. Amworth - 8/10
42. Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries - 2/10
43. Algernon Blackwood - Confession - 2/10
44. Saki - The Open Window - 5/10
45. Oliver Onions - The Beckoning fair One - 4/10
46. Walter de la Mare - Out of the Deep - 1/10
47. A. E. Coppard - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me - 2/10
48. E. M. Forster - The Celestial Omnibus - 3/10
49. Richard Middleton - The Ghost Ship - 4/10
50. Isak Dinesen - Sailor Boy's Tale - 5/10
51. H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls - 8/10
52. H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror - 9/10
October 1, 2025
ooh spooky
Tales of Terror
"La Grande Bretêche" by Honoré de Balzac
is it weird that when i finished this story i had no idea what happened but i liked it??? the ending was very similar to edgar allan poe's , who coincidentally has two stories in this collection
rating: 3.25/5
"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe
speaking of edgar allan poe, here he is! weirdly this story ALSO had a ending like the last one...
rating: 3.5/5
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe
another poe, a bit more boring than the last one
rating: 3.25/5
"A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins
in case you're wondering what exactly is strange about the terribly strange bed is that . somehow a unique premise that still manages to be a bit dull.
rating: 3/5
"The Boarded Window" by Ambrose Bierce
this one was just boring. not much else to say here
rating: 2.5/5
"The Three Strangers" by Thomas Hardy
A really good story which made up for the last one. I wouldn't put it as part of a collection called "Tales of Terror," though—it wasn't that scary; I suppose the editors have different definitions of terror than I do. But I am definitely going to read more Hardy after this.
rating: 4.25/5
"The Interruption" by W. W. Jacobs
to be honest i don't even remember what this was about. so if you were looking for an insightful review this time around, sorry. (just kidding i'm not sorry at all)
rating: 3.5/5
"Pollock and the Porroh Man" by H. G. Wells
unfortunately just really racist. i was expecting better from wells but considering that he lived in the early 1900s maybe i shouldn't have
rating: 1.5/5
"The Sea Raiders" by H. G. Wells
another h.g. wells, this time rated slightly higher because—thankfully!—this one manages not to be racist. this time it's about scary squids, which is unsurprisingly not scary at all.
rating: 2/5
"Sredni Vashtar" by Saki
halfway through the story you know exactly what is going to happen by the end, but it is still a delight to read. i still prefer saki's "the music on the hill," though i have bought his entire works to read; hopefully those will be just as sharp as these two!
rating: 3.75/5
"Moonlight Sonata" by Alexander Woollcott
this one is like 3 pages long and it's just about an insane old man. usually i'd hide the spoiler there but it's not even worth doing.
rating: 3/5
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" by Conrad Aiken
rating: 4/5
"Suspicion" by Dorothy L. Sayers
rating: 4.25/5
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
rating: 4/5
"Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson
rating: 4/5
"The Gentleman from America" by Michael Arlen
the gentleman from america does not, in fact, sound like a gentleman from america. also, this story is so overwritten. the purple prose is much too purple
rating: 2/5
"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
rating: 3.5/5
"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway
the most average story i've ever read.
rating: 3/5
"Back for Christmas" by John Collier
rating: 3.25/5
"Taboo" by Geoffrey Household
rating: 4.5/5
Tales of the Supernatural
"The Haunters and the Haunted; or, the House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
rating: 3.75/5
"Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
rating: 3.5/5
"The Trial for Murder" by Charles Dickens
rating: 4/5
"Green Tea" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
rating: 4/5
"What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien
rating: 4.5/5
"Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James
rating: 3.5/5
"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant
Overly long, and I didn't like the ending. Interesting concept with a poor execution.
rating: 3/5
"Was it a Dream?" by Guy de Maupassant
Very short story with an interesting premise and slightly underwhelming ending - it rushes at you quickly, with little foreshadowing to back itself up.
rating: 3.25/5
"The Screaming Skull" by F. Marion Crawford
rating: 3.25/5
"The Furnished Room" by O. Henry
Why does every noun need so many adjectives? Dislike his writing style intensely.
rating: 2/5
"Casting the Runes" by M. R. James
rating: 3.5/5
"'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" by M. R. James
rating: 3.5/5
"Afterward" by Edith Wharton
rating: 3.5/5
"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs
A classic for a reason: it still holds up even now.
rating: 3.75/5
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Meh. Too much purplish prose for my taste.
rating: 3/5
"How Love Came to Professor Guildea" by Robert Hichens
Liked this one. Very obvious metaphor for repressed homosexuality, given that the author was closeted. I want a version of this story where the priest and the scientist were in love.
rating: 4.5/5
"The Return of Imray" by Rudyard Kipling
Fine. Unfortunately somewhat racist.
rating: 3/5
"'They'" by Rudyard Kipling
Better than Kipling's other story. Lots and lots of nature descriptions, which I liked. Unfortunately uses some offensive language—the n-word, in particular.
rating: 3.5/5
"Lukundoo" by Edward Lucas White
Also racist. About a journey into Africa and an encounter with a witch doctor. Not great.
rating: 2/5
"Caterpillars" by E. F. Benson
A story about evil caterpillars that cause...cancer. I mean...alright, I guess?
rating: 3.25/5
"Mrs. Amworth" by E. F. Benson
In a small English village resides an evil, yet really nice vampire named Mrs. Amworth. Goes pretty much how you would expect. Fun. If Mrs. Amworth lived in my village I feel like we would be really chill.
rating: 3.75/5
"Ancient Sorceries" by Algernon Blackwood
rating: 3.75/5
"Confession" by Algernon Blackwood
An utter banger! Not at all supernatural, so why the hell it's in this section I haven't a clue.
rating: 5/5
"The Open Window" by Saki
A fun, short comedy.
rating: 3.5/5
"The Beckoning Fair One" by Oliver Onions
Overly long and with a poor ending.
rating: 3/5
"Out of the Deep" by Walter de la Mare
Frankly around half of this was incomprehensible to me. I'm not even sure I could tell you the plot.
rating: 2/5
"Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" by A. E. Coppard
rating: 3.5/5
"The Celestial Omnibus" by E. M. Forster
rating: 3.5/5
"The Ghost Ship" by Richard Middleton
rating: 3.75/5
"The Sailor Boy's Tale" by Isak Dinesen
rating: 3.75/5
"The Rats in the Walls" by H. P. Lovecraft
rating: 3.5/5
Tales of Terror
"La Grande Bretêche" by Honoré de Balzac
is it weird that when i finished this story i had no idea what happened but i liked it??? the ending was very similar to edgar allan poe's , who coincidentally has two stories in this collection
rating: 3.25/5
"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe
speaking of edgar allan poe, here he is! weirdly this story ALSO had a ending like the last one...
rating: 3.5/5
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe
another poe, a bit more boring than the last one
rating: 3.25/5
"A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins
in case you're wondering what exactly is strange about the terribly strange bed is that . somehow a unique premise that still manages to be a bit dull.
rating: 3/5
"The Boarded Window" by Ambrose Bierce
this one was just boring. not much else to say here
rating: 2.5/5
"The Three Strangers" by Thomas Hardy
A really good story which made up for the last one. I wouldn't put it as part of a collection called "Tales of Terror," though—it wasn't that scary; I suppose the editors have different definitions of terror than I do. But I am definitely going to read more Hardy after this.
rating: 4.25/5
"The Interruption" by W. W. Jacobs
to be honest i don't even remember what this was about. so if you were looking for an insightful review this time around, sorry. (just kidding i'm not sorry at all)
rating: 3.5/5
"Pollock and the Porroh Man" by H. G. Wells
unfortunately just really racist. i was expecting better from wells but considering that he lived in the early 1900s maybe i shouldn't have
rating: 1.5/5
"The Sea Raiders" by H. G. Wells
another h.g. wells, this time rated slightly higher because—thankfully!—this one manages not to be racist. this time it's about scary squids, which is unsurprisingly not scary at all.
rating: 2/5
"Sredni Vashtar" by Saki
halfway through the story you know exactly what is going to happen by the end, but it is still a delight to read. i still prefer saki's "the music on the hill," though i have bought his entire works to read; hopefully those will be just as sharp as these two!
rating: 3.75/5
"Moonlight Sonata" by Alexander Woollcott
this one is like 3 pages long and it's just about an insane old man. usually i'd hide the spoiler there but it's not even worth doing.
rating: 3/5
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" by Conrad Aiken
rating: 4/5
"Suspicion" by Dorothy L. Sayers
rating: 4.25/5
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
rating: 4/5
"Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson
rating: 4/5
"The Gentleman from America" by Michael Arlen
the gentleman from america does not, in fact, sound like a gentleman from america. also, this story is so overwritten. the purple prose is much too purple
rating: 2/5
"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
rating: 3.5/5
"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway
the most average story i've ever read.
rating: 3/5
"Back for Christmas" by John Collier
rating: 3.25/5
"Taboo" by Geoffrey Household
rating: 4.5/5
Tales of the Supernatural
"The Haunters and the Haunted; or, the House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
rating: 3.75/5
"Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
rating: 3.5/5
"The Trial for Murder" by Charles Dickens
rating: 4/5
"Green Tea" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
rating: 4/5
"What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien
rating: 4.5/5
"Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James
rating: 3.5/5
"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant
Overly long, and I didn't like the ending. Interesting concept with a poor execution.
rating: 3/5
"Was it a Dream?" by Guy de Maupassant
Very short story with an interesting premise and slightly underwhelming ending - it rushes at you quickly, with little foreshadowing to back itself up.
rating: 3.25/5
"The Screaming Skull" by F. Marion Crawford
rating: 3.25/5
"The Furnished Room" by O. Henry
Why does every noun need so many adjectives? Dislike his writing style intensely.
rating: 2/5
"Casting the Runes" by M. R. James
rating: 3.5/5
"'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" by M. R. James
rating: 3.5/5
"Afterward" by Edith Wharton
rating: 3.5/5
"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs
A classic for a reason: it still holds up even now.
rating: 3.75/5
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Meh. Too much purplish prose for my taste.
rating: 3/5
"How Love Came to Professor Guildea" by Robert Hichens
Liked this one. Very obvious metaphor for repressed homosexuality, given that the author was closeted. I want a version of this story where the priest and the scientist were in love.
rating: 4.5/5
"The Return of Imray" by Rudyard Kipling
Fine. Unfortunately somewhat racist.
rating: 3/5
"'They'" by Rudyard Kipling
Better than Kipling's other story. Lots and lots of nature descriptions, which I liked. Unfortunately uses some offensive language—the n-word, in particular.
rating: 3.5/5
"Lukundoo" by Edward Lucas White
Also racist. About a journey into Africa and an encounter with a witch doctor. Not great.
rating: 2/5
"Caterpillars" by E. F. Benson
A story about evil caterpillars that cause...cancer. I mean...alright, I guess?
rating: 3.25/5
"Mrs. Amworth" by E. F. Benson
In a small English village resides an evil, yet really nice vampire named Mrs. Amworth. Goes pretty much how you would expect. Fun. If Mrs. Amworth lived in my village I feel like we would be really chill.
rating: 3.75/5
"Ancient Sorceries" by Algernon Blackwood
rating: 3.75/5
"Confession" by Algernon Blackwood
An utter banger! Not at all supernatural, so why the hell it's in this section I haven't a clue.
rating: 5/5
"The Open Window" by Saki
A fun, short comedy.
rating: 3.5/5
"The Beckoning Fair One" by Oliver Onions
Overly long and with a poor ending.
rating: 3/5
"Out of the Deep" by Walter de la Mare
Frankly around half of this was incomprehensible to me. I'm not even sure I could tell you the plot.
rating: 2/5
"Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" by A. E. Coppard
rating: 3.5/5
"The Celestial Omnibus" by E. M. Forster
rating: 3.5/5
"The Ghost Ship" by Richard Middleton
rating: 3.75/5
"The Sailor Boy's Tale" by Isak Dinesen
rating: 3.75/5
"The Rats in the Walls" by H. P. Lovecraft
rating: 3.5/5
Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews