Essential Horror Anthologies

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I vastly prefer short stories to novels, in the horror genre. I find that it's hard to extend a sense of the horrific over an extended length without descending into some degree of a pornography of cruelty (as in Dean Koontz's Intensity), or simply having too much tension and a consequently flat resolution (as in Ramsey Campbell's To Wake The Dead).

Nearly all the horror I've read over the years and enjoyed has been in the form of short stories, but I recently had the chance to read a horror anthology that stood out as a real quality collection and essential to any horror reader's library: Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McAuley. Another anthology which I found remarkably consistent and essential was (ed)Hugh Lamb's A Taste of Fear. The Far Reaches of Fear (ed: Ramsey Campbell) also.

So, I was wondering what horror anthologies you'd like to add to this list. They could be widely accepted genre landmarks like Dark Forces, relatively lesser known collections, and not necessarily multi-author collections but even those published by a single author.

 

[hodor]

i dont know if i would consider them "horror" to the upmost but they definitely required an odd mind to think up... stephen king used to write under the name richard bachman and there is a book called The Bachman Books with four short stories... rage the long walk roadwork and thinner i think. i liked that one.

and i have read alot of short stories by ambrose bierce such as oil of dog occurance at owl creek bridge chikamauga... he is oooollllddddd but i love him. the devils dictionary rules.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I like the stories collected as The Bachman Books a lot, too. A different sort of horror from what King usually writes, and some very chilling stories there.

 

[Leto]

The best horror anthology I've read recently was Swamp foetus by Poppy Z Brite.
But in the horror genre, short stories as novels are welcomed. Anything written by Graham Masterton will certainly grap my attention for example.
Since Bags of Bones, Stephen King's writing is very deceiving. Whaterver the name he use, he's always been an hit-and-miss writer but now IMO he's only a miss one.

 

[j d worthington]

On the whole, I tend to prefer the older horror, though there are definite exceptions (Ligotti, Klein -- at his best, Campbell -- usually shorts, etc.) I'd suggest, if you can find it, Montague Summers' Supernatural Omnibus for a nice dose of things from the latter 19th-early 20th centuries; a couple of anthologies edited by S. T. Joshi: Great Weird Tales and Great Tales of Terror (not particularly original titles, but very good contents); and a large (1076 pages) old book titled Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser which came out in the 1940s and has had many, many printings (I believe it was recently reissued yet again), which begins with Balzac and goes through Lovecraft. A lot of old reliables here, but also some not so well known.

A new overview of Ligotti's work, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, would be a good introduction, if any haven't read him yet, and (again, if you can find it) T. E. D. Klein's Dark Gods is a nice set of four novellas worth reading. (Though I believe one of these was in the Dark Forces anthology originally.)

 

[pendragonpress]

Two new anthologies from Gary Fry are worth a look - Bernie Hermann's Manic Sextet and Poe's Progeny - and I'm far too modest to mention my own anthologies by name... *blushes*

 

[mortbury]

and I'm far too modest to mention my own anthologies by name... *blushes*

I'm not too modest to mention the ones I've published!

The Black Book of Horror
and
The Second Black Book of Horror

 

[Amalthea]

Some of you may not consider this horror (at least it is not the Stephen King type), but I would recommend The October Country by Ray Bradbury.

 

[Connavar]

I cant believe how little activity it is in this thread.

I expected to see more recommendation for essential anthologies.

Doesnt help a horror newbie this thread as you might think from the thread name.

 

[j d worthington]

Some of you may not consider this horror (at least it is not the Stephen King type), but I would recommend The October Country by Ray Bradbury.

I'd consider it (at least to some degree) horror, but not an anthology (as are, for that matter, the Ligotti and Klein I mentioned earlier); it's a single-author collection. Damn fine book, though, and a good suggestion.

Part of the problem, Connavar, is that it depends on what you are looking for as "horror" -- whether it is the older "classics", the more modern work, the splatterpunks, "quiet" horror, or a broad range of all of these (and beyond).

But, since this thread has once more been brought to my attention:

The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry (1983), ed. by Patricia L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe

The Haunted Omnibus (1937), ed. by Alexander Laing

The Arbor House Necropolis (1981), ed. by Bill Pronzini, containing three anthologies: Voodoo! A Chrestomathy of Necromancy, Mummy! A Chrestomathy of "Crypt-ology", and Ghoul! A Chrestomathy of "Ogrery" (it has also had a later incarnation as Tales of the Dead, with very slight changes).

Werewolf! A Chrestomathy of Lycanthropy (1979), ed. by Bill Pronzini

Specter! A Chrestomathy of "Spookery" (1982), ed. by Bill Pronzini

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (new ed. 2001), ed. by Chris Baldick

Victorian Ghost Stories (1991), ed. by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert

The Mammoth Book of Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories (1995), ed. by Richard Dalby

The Mammoth Book of Classic Chillers (1986), ed. by Tim Haydock

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare (1993), ed. by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, & Martin H. Greenberg

Not all of these are "essentials", by any means, but they are all good-sized selections from throughout the fields represented, and a hefty dose of really good reading in the genre....

I'll post some others a little later on....

 

[ravenus]

The Mammoth Book of Terror was an excellent antho as I recall.

Tales of Terror and Darkness by Algernon Blackwood I enjoyed .

Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti is a lovely compendium of his previous short story collections.

 

[Connavar]

I'd consider it (at least to some degree) horror, but not an anthology (as are, for that matter, the Ligotti and Klein I mentioned earlier); it's a single-author collection. Damn fine book, though, and a good suggestion.

Part of the problem, Connavar, is that it depends on what you are looking for as "horror" -- whether it is the older "classics", the more modern work, the splatterpunks, "quiet" horror, or a broad range of all of these (and beyond).

But, since this thread has once more been brought to my attention:

The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry (1983), ed. by Patricia L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe

The Haunted Omnibus (1937), ed. by Alexander Laing

The Arbor House Necropolis (1981), ed. by Bill Pronzini, containing three anthologies: Voodoo! A Chrestomathy of Necromancy, Mummy! A Chrestomathy of "Crypt-ology", and Ghoul! A Chrestomathy of "Ogrery" (it has also had a later incarnation as Tales of the Dead, with very slight changes).

Werewolf! A Chrestomathy of Lycanthropy (1979), ed. by Bill Pronzini

Specter! A Chrestomathy of "Spookery" (1982), ed. by Bill Pronzini

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (new ed. 2001), ed. by Chris Baldick

Victorian Ghost Stories (1991), ed. by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert

The Mammoth Book of Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories (1995), ed. by Richard Dalby

The Mammoth Book of Classic Chillers (1986), ed. by Tim Haydock

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare (1993), ed. by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, & Martin H. Greenberg

Not all of these are "essentials", by any means, but they are all good-sized selections from throughout the fields represented, and a hefty dose of really good reading in the genre....

I'll post some others a little later on....

I enjoy the classic i know that but i would like anthologies that contain different types of story in the genre. Whats interesting in modern horror ?


The trouble of being a newbie of the genre is you dont whats good of the many different types.

Only type i can say im not interested is Splatter type, crap that is only brutal violence and nothing other to it. The stuff that dominate hollywood these in other words. I would never read short stories/book stories of the type Saw,Final Destination etc

 

[BookStop]

Don't foreget Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. It has The Mist, The Raft, Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, The Jaunt,...actaully every single story in the book is really, really good; some of his best work I think.

 

[nomadman]

Although long OOP, Robert Aickman's Fontana anthologies are still relatively easy to find, and a great introduction to some classic horror authors. They're also one of the few affordable ways to read Aickman himself, a writer frustratingly hard to find unless you're prepared to pay the ludicrous prices asked for them.

 

[j d worthington]

Although long OOP, Robert Aickman's Fontana anthologies are still relatively easy to find, and a great introduction to some classic horror authors. They're also one of the few affordable ways to read Aickman himself, a writer frustratingly hard to find unless you're prepared to pay the ludicrous prices asked for them.

These, though, were the Fontana Books of Ghost Stories, weren't they? It was Christine Bernard that did the first four Fontana Books of Great Horror Stories, and then Mary Danby took over through the 17th. I'd agree these are very good collections indeed -- Aickman's particularly so, but the Great Horror Stories were chock-full of great horror (both classic and modern) as well. The Pan Books of Great Horror (and Ghost) Stories were also often well worth looking into.

Connavar: Several of those I mentioned also were a mix of classic and modern, the exceptions being the older anthologies or those which specifically went for the Victorian and Edwardian tales. Even The Evil Image and the Baldick, by tracing the history of the Gothic, brought in recent tales (The Evil Image, for instance, going from Defoe to King), while the Pronzini were usually divided into sections devoted to the classic and the modern, and so forth. The same is true of several of the suggested collections by others, too.

Another series worth looking up is the Year's Best Horror Stories put out by DAW here in the States, though the first few volumes of those were reprints of British anthologies, as I recall. The first three were edited by Richard Davis, followed by Gerald W. Page (IV-VII) and then Karl Edward Wagner (VIII-XXII). When Wagner died, the series was discontinued. These have an awful lot of very good new material in them. Not all are classics, but a rather high percentage are close to. Stephen Jones has also done a fair number of very good modern horror anthologies, and is very knowledgeable on the field. In fact, he co-edited two anthologies of essays by various writers choosing what they felt were the 100 best books in the field; both of these are well worth looking up.

Here's a listing of the books Jones has edited or co-edited, from fantasticfiction.com:

Stephen Jones

As you can see, he has also edited a series of Year's Best for quite some time now....


Question: we seem to keep including single-author collections as well as anthologies (collections of tales by various writers) here. I suppose this should require a change to "Anthologies and Collections", no? As for the suggestions made on such collections -- all have been top-notch so far.

 

[Barney]

Connavar, if it's modern short horror fiction you're interested in I don't think you can do much better than Ramsey Campbell. Have a look at his bibliography on his wikipedia entry, there are quite a few collections of his short stories.
Campbell is frequently featured in anthologies, and it is his stories I normally go to first when I buy one!

 

[j d worthington]

I'll second the suggestion of Campbell. By no means are all of his tales supernatural, nor are all of them the very best; but a substantial amount are both, and he is one of the best writers in the field going -- right up there with Ligotti, Klein, and a select handful of others.

 

[GOLLUM]

I'll second the suggestion of Campbell. By no means are all of his tales supernatural, nor are all of them the very best; but a substantial amount are both, and he is one of the best writers in the field going -- right up there with Ligotti, Klein, and a select handful of others.

So is there a definitive collection to look for?

 

[j d worthington]

Not a single collection that I can think of, no; though probably the closest would be the collections Alone with the Horrors and Ghosts and Grisly Things; the first collects together a good selection of tales from throughout Campbell's career to that point, while the latter is largely more recent short works.

A third collection, which also showcases how Campbell can truly make horror uncomfortable, delving into connections many have trouble with, is Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death. While Campbell deals quite openly here with the interrelation between the two, it is much less a "sexualization" of horror than a look at the roots of much that is emotionally disturbing about the field; overall an honest look at the subject through the lens of fiction. Not for everyone, but a good collection, nonetheless.

 

[Barney]

So is there a definitive collection to look for?

Not really. But I would say some of the themed collections are an acquired taste. If you don't like Lovecraft you won't like Cold Print. Scared Stiff I didn't think was entirely succesful. But I think you will be satisfied with any of the general collections.
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