Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

by Nancy Kilpatrick, Michael Marshall Smith, Mick Garris, et al.

Firmly established as the world's premier horror anthology series, this latest volume is twice the size, presenting almost a quarter of a million words of new fiction by some of the hottest names and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 185798322X
• ISBN13: 9781857983227
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Millennium Paperbacks
• Length: 562 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.5" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Possibly The Most Diverse Horror Collection I've Read, With Some Real Gems

Containing 31 tales ranging from the 4-page 'Final Departure' by Gahan Wilson to the novella-length 'Pelican Cay' by David Case, 'Dark Terrors 5' is one of the larger and better collections you'll find presenting a diverse and high quality batch of horror stories and related tales. Its contributors range from major names like Peter Straub, Graham Masterton and Brian Stableford through relatively obscure writers such as James Van Pelt and Eric Brown. Not everything in the collection would usually be classified as horror, and a couple would be pressed to meet even a broad definition. "Dark Terrors 5" presents a very wide range of material, and appears to be assembled on the belief (and this was a good decision, in my mind) that most horror readers aren't going to mind a few tales in a collection this size that lean much more heavily in the direction of mystery, fantasy, or such fields. Most of the 31 stories here fall more definitively in horror territory, although a few might be considered crossovers with another 'genre'. I like this arrangement very much. Personally, when I go into a book of short stories, I like to have the doors open pretty wide as to what I might get in each tale. Like if you have a book called "The Vampire Collection" or whatever, then no matter how great all the stories they've assembled are, the anthology is probably going to have a hard time after the first four or five stories getting each piece to differentiate itself when read back-to-back; not to mention that if you've got a story with a revelation that vampires are what the story is actually about, and it only comes in the last couple of pages, then that element of surprise is pretty much non-existant in a closely themed collection. With "Dark Terrors 5" you really don't know what you're getting as you start each story - it could develop into a ghost story with heavy comedic overtones, it could turn into a dark thriller-ish tale with no 'supernatural' element at all, it could be a really monsterous, gory tale. It deserves credit for sheer diversity alone. But no matter how diverse a collection is, it's going to matter little if it's a diverse batch of stories that are all weak. Fortunately, this book is packed with quality tales and a good number of true gems. Among the standouts are 'The Handover' by Michael Marshall Smith, 'Valentia' by Caitlin R. Kiernan, 'Savannah Is Six' by James Van Pelt and 'The Proposal' by Nicolas Royle. I hesitate to describe the stories too much, because one thing a lot of them have in common is that much of the appeal is in uncovering each story's focus as you go on; for a lot of these, too much advance description would threaten to take away some of that appeal. There are a few things I can get into without being too specific. For those who love the old-style supernatural writings of the 1800s and early 1900s, the kind of stuff you find in books like "Classic Edwardian And Victorian Ghost Stories" and "The Dra