November GrauI just finished an old bumper Bill Pronzini anthology called Tales of the Dead, which I found at Sourdeval book shelter. It is very unusual to find horror there, still less short horror, and these Pronzini anthologies are very hard to get now outside the US. You wouldn't believe the postage and packing on those things. So it was quite a find.
Anyway, there are several good stories, though also a lot of gubbins. It comes in 3 sections calmly titled VOODOO!, MUMMY!, and GHOUL! The voodoo section was probably the most interesting in terms of the unfamiliar material it offered, though you've got to eat a lot of excitable descriptions of black peoples' "rolling" eyes and large teeth to get to the good stuff. Interestingly the story that felt the most respectful of its foreign culture was Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Isle of Voices", set on Hawaii, and a pleasingly peculiar number it is too, not unlike some of Gary Kilworth's Pacific fare. WB Seabrook also acquits himself well: the mere title of his contribution, "...Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields", is almost a horror story in itself. A frustrating feature of the zombie revival of the mid-2000s was the way it focussed on the disruption of suburbia and seemed to almost completely ignore the labour (and race) relations side of zombie folklore, but back in 1929 old Seabrook certainly didn't have his head in the sand. There's also a nice snappy modern voodoo story called "The Candidate" by Henry Slezar, which is short and sharp enough to have a satisying sting in the tail decades after it was written.
The second section feels relatively refined, probably because it has less chicken guts being spilled and more long-dead rich guys hanging around in dry bandages. One exception is EF Bensons "Monkeys": the sophisticated author of a tonne of high-society bridge-clique comedies rolls his sleeves up and gets surprisingly physical. I'm well-used to Benson's power as a ghost story writer but this is a particularly gorey job, though stylishly written as ever. Charles L Grant also pulls off a successful transplant ot the mummy legend to an old American farmstead, whose new owners discover something nasty in their hearth. What really makes this story is the building sense of dread, though a modern reader might be a bit underwhelmed by the total pointlessness of the women characters.
The last section, Ghoul!, is the weakest, with not enough variety of concept and too much overblown and just plain bad writing, though Charles L Grant appears again with another moody and fairly classy story, "Quietly Now" (with some meatier roles for the ladies this time), and there's a memorably strange morgue story called "The Spherical Ghoul" by Frederic Brown.
All in all, this isn't the sort of book I would have enjoyed paying 30+ quid for, and a lot of the stories have aged in various ways, but I did appreciate the effort Pronzini made to include non-obvious material (OK, he couldn't resist Stevenson's "The Body Snatchers" and Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249, but he's only human) and a wider range of cultures than just the Caribbean for the voodoo section. He's definitely a serious anthologist and I will be keeping an eye open for more of his stuff.!
#BookReview
#HorrorFiction
#ShortStories
#TheOccult
Anyway, there are several good stories, though also a lot of gubbins. It comes in 3 sections calmly titled VOODOO!, MUMMY!, and GHOUL! The voodoo section was probably the most interesting in terms of the unfamiliar material it offered, though you've got to eat a lot of excitable descriptions of black peoples' "rolling" eyes and large teeth to get to the good stuff. Interestingly the story that felt the most respectful of its foreign culture was Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Isle of Voices", set on Hawaii, and a pleasingly peculiar number it is too, not unlike some of Gary Kilworth's Pacific fare. WB Seabrook also acquits himself well: the mere title of his contribution, "...Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields", is almost a horror story in itself. A frustrating feature of the zombie revival of the mid-2000s was the way it focussed on the disruption of suburbia and seemed to almost completely ignore the labour (and race) relations side of zombie folklore, but back in 1929 old Seabrook certainly didn't have his head in the sand. There's also a nice snappy modern voodoo story called "The Candidate" by Henry Slezar, which is short and sharp enough to have a satisying sting in the tail decades after it was written.
The second section feels relatively refined, probably because it has less chicken guts being spilled and more long-dead rich guys hanging around in dry bandages. One exception is EF Bensons "Monkeys": the sophisticated author of a tonne of high-society bridge-clique comedies rolls his sleeves up and gets surprisingly physical. I'm well-used to Benson's power as a ghost story writer but this is a particularly gorey job, though stylishly written as ever. Charles L Grant also pulls off a successful transplant ot the mummy legend to an old American farmstead, whose new owners discover something nasty in their hearth. What really makes this story is the building sense of dread, though a modern reader might be a bit underwhelmed by the total pointlessness of the women characters.
The last section, Ghoul!, is the weakest, with not enough variety of concept and too much overblown and just plain bad writing, though Charles L Grant appears again with another moody and fairly classy story, "Quietly Now" (with some meatier roles for the ladies this time), and there's a memorably strange morgue story called "The Spherical Ghoul" by Frederic Brown.
All in all, this isn't the sort of book I would have enjoyed paying 30+ quid for, and a lot of the stories have aged in various ways, but I did appreciate the effort Pronzini made to include non-obvious material (OK, he couldn't resist Stevenson's "The Body Snatchers" and Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249, but he's only human) and a wider range of cultures than just the Caribbean for the voodoo section. He's definitely a serious anthologist and I will be keeping an eye open for more of his stuff.!
#BookReview
#HorrorFiction
#ShortStories
#TheOccult
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