The Wine-Dark Sea is the third collection of Robert Aikman stories I’ve reviewed here recently, and the weakest by far. The best of Aikman’s “strange stories,” as he called them, begin with a completely ordinary situation, and fairly quickly ramp…
Category: Culture
I should have known this volume of Ambrose Bierce’s ghost and horror stories would be a clunker when E. F. Bleiler, in his introduction, almost apologized for the up-and-down quality of the stories — as well as for Bierce’s famously…
The King in Yellow is a collection of nine short stories and several poems written by William W. Chambers in 1895. It was highly regarded by H. P. Lovecraft and is something of a cult classic in the horror genre.…
The Unsettled Dust is a collection of short stories by the great Robert Aickman (1914-1981), an English writer and conservationist highly esteemed by horror genre authors and fans, despite his relatively small output of 48 stories. Aickman called his works…
Horror Stories, an Oxford World Classics anthology, hasn’t a weak link in its 29-story chain. Authors represented in this volume include Honore de Balzac, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle,…