Bookmonkey x Penguin Horror Day 30: American Supernatural Tales

The final book in the collection, American Supernatural Tales, edited by S.T. Joshi, is a really fun way to round out the collection.  Using short stories involving the supernatural from as far back as the early 1800s with Washington Irving (the fellow who wrote both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and moving right up to recent Bram Stoker ward winners like Stephen King and Caitlin R. Kiernan, the title works to introduce reads to some really great stuff as well as showing how the form has changed over the last nearly 200 years.

For me, horror has always worked best as a short story, pulling off terror and horror over the extended form of the novel can be trickily at best and tedious at worst.  This doesn't mean I'm not a fan of horror novels, it just means tat if you grabbed a bunch of horror short stories and a bunch of horror novels at random, I think you would find a high count of great ones in the short story collection.

The book obtains a lot of stories by personal favourite authors, like Fritz Lieber, Richard Matheson, and Caitlin R. Kiernan.  A great introduction to some really scary stuff and a fine way to round out the imprint.

Things I’ve Noticed: Some short story collections are better than others

Today I finished the short Story Collection, Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsay Campbell. I’ve only ever read one novel by the author – The Doll Who Ate His Mother, which was a pretty good read and created a kind of monster I had never read before. The reason I read this collection is that it was the 100th book of from the non-ficiton title, Horror: The 100 Best Books, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.

This collection features a selection of short stories written by the author presented in publication order – specifically stories published from 1964 to 1987. This gives the reader the ability to see how the author has changed and grown over the years, from his earliest Lovecraft-inspired stories, through to some of the creepiest stories I’ve read in quite a while.

*Quick note – my personal favourites of the collection were In The Bag (1976), The Companion (1977), and The Fit (1980).

Earlier this year I read The Call of Cthulhu and other Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft which worked in the same format, allowing the reader to see the evolution of the author's style.

I do enjoy all types of anthologies and regular short story collections, but there is something I’m finding really cool about reading stories which were published over a long period of time and show just how much a writer's skill can grow.