The recent gloomy weather, which seems to have changed yesterday and today, made me think about Halloween and long for it. When summer does not seem to be showing up at all, one ends up longing for autumn. I am like this anyway. Because my mind was set on Halloween I thought it was the right time to beef up my library with horror stories. So I Gothic Short Stories, which is, well, an anthology of gothic short stories, as well as books of stories by Edith Nesbit and Edith Wharton. I am building up quite a nice personal collection, although I am far from a connoisseur yet. Which leads me to this post's topic: anthologies are often made of the same stories I will find somewhere else. This one is interesting, but many of the stories I have already read before, mainly in other anthologies. This is why I decided to buy the stories of Nesbit and Wharton. But many authors of horror, especially gothic horror, are now little known and rarely get published on their own. So I will have to keep on buying anthologies. Maybe one day I will become the editor of one.
Sunday, 26 May 2013
The problem with anthologies
The recent gloomy weather, which seems to have changed yesterday and today, made me think about Halloween and long for it. When summer does not seem to be showing up at all, one ends up longing for autumn. I am like this anyway. Because my mind was set on Halloween I thought it was the right time to beef up my library with horror stories. So I Gothic Short Stories, which is, well, an anthology of gothic short stories, as well as books of stories by Edith Nesbit and Edith Wharton. I am building up quite a nice personal collection, although I am far from a connoisseur yet. Which leads me to this post's topic: anthologies are often made of the same stories I will find somewhere else. This one is interesting, but many of the stories I have already read before, mainly in other anthologies. This is why I decided to buy the stories of Nesbit and Wharton. But many authors of horror, especially gothic horror, are now little known and rarely get published on their own. So I will have to keep on buying anthologies. Maybe one day I will become the editor of one.
I've always really enjoyed Bruce Coville "Book of" series of anthologies ("Book of Monsters", "Book of Ghosts", "Book of Nightmares", etcetera)
ReplyDeleteBut then I've a fondness for kids books with spooky themes.
The "Book of" series is particularly neat though because lots of the stories were commissioned specifically for the anthology.
For Christmas I received a really excellent anthology of ghost stories curated by Roald Dahl, who really knew his ghost stories.