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Strangeness
Thomas M. Disch - Luncheon in the Sepulcher
Shirley Jackson - The Beautiful Stranger
Virginia Woolf - Solid Objects
Brian W. Aldiss - Where the Lines Converge
Italo Calvino - All at One Point
Sarah Orne Jewett - The Waiting Place
Philip José Farmer - Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind
Joan Aiken - Elephant's Ear
Joyce Carol Oates - Bodies
M. John Harrison - Running Down
Thomas M. Disch - The Roaches
Russell Fitzgerald - The Last Supper
Wiliiam Sansom - Among the Dahlias
Graham Greene - Under the Garden
Pamela Zoline - The Holland of the Mind
John Sladek - Elephant with Wooden Leg
Thomas Mann - The Wardrobe
Shirley Jackson - The Beautiful Stranger
Virginia Woolf - Solid Objects
Brian W. Aldiss - Where the Lines Converge
Italo Calvino - All at One Point
Sarah Orne Jewett - The Waiting Place
Philip José Farmer - Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind
Joan Aiken - Elephant's Ear
Joyce Carol Oates - Bodies
M. John Harrison - Running Down
Thomas M. Disch - The Roaches
Russell Fitzgerald - The Last Supper
Wiliiam Sansom - Among the Dahlias
Graham Greene - Under the Garden
Pamela Zoline - The Holland of the Mind
John Sladek - Elephant with Wooden Leg
Thomas Mann - The Wardrobe
Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
2 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
Thomas M. Disch
379 books313 followersPoet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him; both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works.
In later years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances -- what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical.
In later years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances -- what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 7, 2008
This is something of an off-beat collection of unusual stories; the feel is reminded me of the old NEW WORLDS circle in the '60s. The authors include Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, as well as more well-known genre practitioners. The stories are all high-quallity, and it's worth searching this one out.
October 26, 2025
(I reviewed each story of this collection on my YouTube channel MarginalReads.)
Supposedly all the stories selected for this anthology, which originate from both sides of the the genre / literary divide, can be linked in some obscure way to the influence of Edgar Allen Poe. Disch stresses that Poe's writings were much more diverse than the gothic fiction he's best known for, and hence this collection is similarly eccentric (although not including a detective story seemed like a mistake to me when considering Poe's August Dupin), but using Disch's arguments you could link almost any remotely strange story to Poe.
Instead, while reading this I became more and more convinced that Disch had simply collected stories that reflected his own taste (and presumably Naylor's), which is a blend of the high and low brow, and the experimental, contemporary and historic, with Poe merely serving as a convenient focal point, if not a terribly convincing one. A lot of the stories have a classy, bourgeois feel to them, occasionally straying into the twee, which I started to get a little tired of by the end. That said, the quality of the stories was generally very high, and I could never tell what kind of story was coming next., although many utilise the themes of the gothic, if not the traditional aesthetics of that genre.
Shirley Jackson and Virginia Woolf's stories were great openers, Aldiss' bizarre novelette is a flawed gem. Bodies by Joyce Carol Oates and Running Down by M John Harrison were my favourites. And the Thomas Mann strange little tale at the end was the perfect send off.
Good collection all in all.
Supposedly all the stories selected for this anthology, which originate from both sides of the the genre / literary divide, can be linked in some obscure way to the influence of Edgar Allen Poe. Disch stresses that Poe's writings were much more diverse than the gothic fiction he's best known for, and hence this collection is similarly eccentric (although not including a detective story seemed like a mistake to me when considering Poe's August Dupin), but using Disch's arguments you could link almost any remotely strange story to Poe.
Instead, while reading this I became more and more convinced that Disch had simply collected stories that reflected his own taste (and presumably Naylor's), which is a blend of the high and low brow, and the experimental, contemporary and historic, with Poe merely serving as a convenient focal point, if not a terribly convincing one. A lot of the stories have a classy, bourgeois feel to them, occasionally straying into the twee, which I started to get a little tired of by the end. That said, the quality of the stories was generally very high, and I could never tell what kind of story was coming next., although many utilise the themes of the gothic, if not the traditional aesthetics of that genre.
Shirley Jackson and Virginia Woolf's stories were great openers, Aldiss' bizarre novelette is a flawed gem. Bodies by Joyce Carol Oates and Running Down by M John Harrison were my favourites. And the Thomas Mann strange little tale at the end was the perfect send off.
Good collection all in all.
Want to read
October 27, 2025PLACEHOLDER REVIEW:
"Solid Objects" by Virginia Woolf - two upstanding young men quarrel on a beach, then one discovers a lump of interesting sea-glass buried by the sands. He takes it home to use as a paperweight, and finds himself ruminating upon the eye-catching oddity to such an extent that he seeks out other singular cast-offs among the waste areas of the town, all while letting his social and political aspirations fade away... I liked it. Seems it could be read as an argument for pursing that which interests you versus the "expected" but traditional and boring paths of life.
"Solid Objects" by Virginia Woolf - two upstanding young men quarrel on a beach, then one discovers a lump of interesting sea-glass buried by the sands. He takes it home to use as a paperweight, and finds himself ruminating upon the eye-catching oddity to such an extent that he seeks out other singular cast-offs among the waste areas of the town, all while letting his social and political aspirations fade away... I liked it. Seems it could be read as an argument for pursing that which interests you versus the "expected" but traditional and boring paths of life.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews