Book review: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
“The Rats in the Walls”…
Book review:
Great Tales of Terror
and the Supernatural
Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser, eds.
The Modern Library, New York, 1944
1,080 pages
Indeed, these are great tales. The usual suspects are here: Poe, H. G. Wells, Lovecraft, Saki, Maupassant. A few tantalizing names are: Edith Wharton, Kipling, Hawthorne, Isak Dinesen…
My taste for horror and supernatural stuff is episodic, a little of it goes a long way for me. In that respect, this is a perfect volume—a reader can dip into it for a taste, then put it aside for a bit, and then go back for more.
Indeed, one reader’s horror is another reader’s trifle. Nevertheless, try reading “The Monkey’s Paw” again. Try reading “Leiningen versus the Ants” again (sure, you read it in middle school—it’s a different feel for a grown-up). Take a chance on O. Henry’s “The Furnished Room”—be prepared to be punched in the heart.
For my taste, Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” is the triumph of the genre. I first read it 50 years ago. Read it many times since. When I think about reading it again, I tremble.
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The tiny sound of the surf…
…listen for the sea…(my poem)
“A silent sea”
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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As an example: Mercy Otis Warren was a phenomenon in the years preceding the Revolutionary War: as a published author, she was an influential propagandist for rebel sympathizers. Warren wrote widely read satirical plays and poems lampooning the British and loyalists, she was an ardent and well-connected letter writer, and she wrote a five-volume “republican” History of England to support the American cause. Roberts says that, in her time, she was “America’s foremost female writer.”
