I’ve always been a fan of short story collections. The short story is a great, under appreciated form of prose-since the writer doesn’t generally have the space to become long-winded, the stories come out lean, terse, and to the point. I always think that the best writers are the ones who can tell a great story without a bunch of verbosity.
Short stories are a great way to discover new writers as well, and Poe’s Children: The New Horror, edited by Peter Straub is no exception.
Poe’s Children took me through a series of stories the likes of which I’d never seen. Usually a collection has one or two tentpole stories surrounded by sub-par offerings, but Straub collected a strong series of horror stories. Of course, Straub’s, King’s and Gaiman’s stories alone are worth the purchase price, but the rest of the book was (for the most part) consistently solid, with standout stories like John Crowley’s Missolonghi 1824 and Thomas Ligotti’s Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story.
Posted on February 20, 2010
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