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This selection is not an overview, nor is it quite a sampling, of the genres it draws from. I refrain even from calling it an eclecticism: I make no pretense of listing the most famous, the most representative, or even the most artistically successful stories (some of the selections are none of these things), but merely the ones that have, despite their occasional defects, impressed themselves deeply and immediately on my memory and imagination.
Many of these stories in are obscure; some exist them are only in out-of-print books, still mouldering under neglected copyright. I'd do something about that if I could, but I can't. What I can do is give you the titles and advise you to haunt your local used-book shop or check out the sellers on Amazon or Abebooks.
A well-conceived, eerie story, almost Lovecraftian in its imagery, from an otherwise undistinguished YA horror anthology called Thirteen.
A crime tale with a bizarre twist. Its first and, as far as I know, last appearance is in the 1955 Dell paperback Mike Shayne's Dangerous Dames. Mr. Shayne's introduction to the story is worth quoting in full:
After reading this story in manuscript, I suddenly realized why so few good stories are printed in magazines today. It's because the editors refuse to buy the ones offered to them.
See if you can figure out why this story by a well-known writer like Anthony Boucher should be appearing here in print for the first time. Are magazine editors nuts — or just allergic to good stories?
Or am I nuts for liking it as well as I do?
A contemporary fantasy in which the youthful god helps two orphans discover the true meaning of Kwanzaa. Really. It's a pity this sweet, intelligent story is so obscure; as far as I know its only appearance is in Volume One of Best of the Midwest's Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror, a 1991 anthology from ESA Publications, now long out of print.
That first volume, edited by Brian Smart, is well worth getting if you can find it; though it suffers from the usual small-press patchiness, it contains several good, forgotten stories: not only "Legba After Christmas," but also David J. Adams's "Tangled Web," D. Douglas Graham's hideous "Motherhood Redeems Women," and S. C. Lofton's "Book'em, Fatso."
(If you would like to read "Legba After Christmas," and can't get a copy of the book, e-mail me your street address and I'll send you a type-up.)
I remember literally shivering as I read this story on a sunny Floridian beach; others of the Collected Ghost Stories were cold comfort to me as I recovered from a shockingly painful sunburn.
Collected Ghost Stories is an omnibus of James's four collections of tales; you can also easily come by a new copy of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, the first of these collections, in which "The Mezzotint" appears.
An unusual tale of revenge, with some genuinely awful implications.
I read this from a computer printout back when the Lovecraft Library was still online. A disagreement over copyright (though the site's creators maintained, convincingly, that the stories are in the public domain) caused that site to be shut down some time ago. At least one other online version still exists; but to avoid its removal, I will not reveal its location. Search for yourself — or buy the book (The Dunwich Horror and Others) in which this story appears.
This is another story I first encountered at the Lovecraft Library; again, it can still be found online if you know where to look. For a print copy, get The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, also available in paperback.
For years after reading this story as a pre-teen, I avoided looking at the clock during the minutes preceding midnight. It's part of The Dark-Thirty, a book of ghost stories inspired by Black Southern folklore. The volume's intended for kids, but it's worthwhile for the adult reader, too.
A story of unusually original conception, with a carefully modulated atmosphere and perfect pacing. Available in Poe's Complete Stories and Poems, in other print collections, and several places online, including at the website of the E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore.
A ghost story in the M. R. James tradition, with some very unsettling imagery. I read it in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series IX, edited by Karl Edward Wagner and covering the year 1980. (Another excellent story from that collection is Dennis Etchison's "On Call.")
A thoroughly disturbing and disgusting tale by the great modern author of surreal horror. It appears in his short-story collection, All Too Surreal, and it's also on his website.
I read this in an anthology called The Screaming Skull and Other Great American Ghost Stories, which is easily available used.
Last updated 24 February, 2005.
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