Classic Tales of Horror

by Jonathan Wooding

Book Overview

This volume presents a collection of 14 classic horror stories from the giants of horror and mystery writing. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1905636113
• ISBN13: 9781905636112
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Beautiful Books
• Length: 251 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

An excellent introduction

Go to the bargain bin section of any major book barn and you'll more than likely see something with a title very similar to this one. These books tend to be clunkers, huge tomes with microscopic print on poor quality paper, with a Table of Contents page that could easily be torn from one book and pasted into the next and no one would ever know the difference. Without even opening the book, you know you're going to find the same two of three stories by Poe, the same tried but true Arthur Conan Doyle stories, and, just maybe, if you're lucky, an occasional tongue-in-cheek ghost story from Oscar Wilde or Saki. The publishers might get a wild hair and throw in a surprise or two, such as "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, or something by Arthur Machen, but don't count on it. And therein lurks the really big problem with doing an anthology of this sort. After all, how do you manage to bring together a selection that doesn't look exactly like a dozen other books already on the market? Despite the fact that writers have produced a huge volume of horror stories over the past few centuries, let's face it, not all of them have stood the test of time. Bram Stoker is a good example. Dracula is, by all rights, one of the finest pieces of horror fiction ever put to paper. However, out of the vast body of short fiction that Stoker produced, few stories, with the possible exception of "Dracula's Guest" and "The Judge's House" still pack a punch today. One could make similar points about writers such as Robert W. Chambers and Oliver Onion and a dozen or so others. So the question becomes, how do you give us our money's worth without boring us with the same old stuff? To that end, the folks at Bloody Books have succeeded with their second volume of Classic Tales of Horror. They put themselves to a hard challenge; namely, giving us something new while at the same time giving us something of high quality, and all in all, they did a very respectable job of it. When I first picked up the book I was a little doubtful, I have to admit. It was smaller than I expected a book of this sort to be, and the cover art a little sparse. Then I turned to the Table of Contents page and saw the lead off hitter, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Schalken the Painter." Le Fanu is no stranger to anthologies of this sort, with stories such as "Green Tea" and "Sir Dominick's Bargain" being the usual selections. "Schalken" was a good choice, I thought. Not totally unique, but still a solid story that doesn't get as much airplay as it deserves. And then I started to scan down the page. I saw a bunch of familiar names, such as M. R. James, who is arguably the finest ghost story writer EVER, and H. P. Lovecraft, and Ambrose Bierce, and Edgar Allan Poe, and I thought, Hmm, not too shabby. Good names, certainly. But here's the kicker. I started looking at the selections, and I was amazed. When was the last time I had seen Poe's "William Wilson" anthologized outside o