Craig's review - 14 november 2008
Classic tales are a god-send for smaller publishers. Most of the tales are royalty-free, enabling the publisher to compile a collection that costs them quite little (hence helping to start and expand the company for future projects). UK's Bloody Books has taken this route with its ‘Classic Tales of Horror‘ series, of which there are currently two volumes.
What I loved most about these collections is that there are genuinely classic tales in here, many of which I have not read for some time. These tales have been latched on to by other forms of media and quite distorted (let's face it, most of them are trashed), so it was great to see the story and hence its vision/version as it was originally produced. There are also rather obscure stories from well-known authors, which adds to the reading pleasure, because you are sharing in a good find. This is definitely a treasure-trove of classic horror.
I won't review the stories, because as classics they've undergone enough dissection. But I will note that Volume 1 contains fifteen stories, including Poe's good-old ‘The Tell-Tale Heart', Mary Shelley's ‘Transformation', Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Markheim', Leonid Andreyev's ‘Silence', Thomas Hardy's ‘The Withered Arm', and Ambrose Bierce's ‘The Man and the Snake'.
Volume 2 of the collection contains fourteen stories. Quite a few authors are repeated from the first volume, which is partly a downside (really, there are so many authors in the ‘classic' range to choose from, there could have been more digging-in-the-crates). The works in this volume include Bram Stoker's ‘The Judge's House', George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil', Sheridan Le Fanu's ‘Schalken the Painter', E Nesbit's ‘Man-size in Marble', H P Lovecraft's ‘The Picture in the House', and two of my favourites, Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘The Body-Snatcher' and W.W. Jacob's ‘The Monkey's Paw'.
The stories that are sourced are brilliant. However, what I did find lacking in these collections was the absence of additional notes, or any notes, for that matter, to accompany the stories. There are no editorials, no introductions, and so on. Since these stories are basically free to publish, what I would have loved to have seen was that the editors put in additional work to increase the collection's depth. We know what's happened to these ‘classic' writers – why not bios, or interesting titbits from their lives, or perhaps stories about how the short fiction in the collection was conceived by the writers?
Nevertheless, these collections are a great read, and a perfect addition to the library of anyone who is getting into the horror genre, or who wants to brush up on their history. And you should be able to get both instalments at a nice price, which is always a good incentive.
the novel
'Classic Tales of Horror vol 1 & 2' - various authors collections (Bloody Books, 2008) - Horror
