Classic Horror Stories: Sixteen Legendary Stories of the Supernatural

I bought this to keep in my car while I wait for other to complete their shopping. I picked this because it contains one of my favorite horror tales. I remember it from a collection I bought in grade school--The Dead Valley. And it is a creepy and frightening now as it was when I was 12. The other stories are of equal footing. Ambrose Bierce is represented with "Middle Toe Right Foot." And that is among my favorite ghost stories. In error I thought I was reading a E.F.Benson story, and it turns out I discovered a new Benson, Robert Hugh, whose "The Watcher did not disappoint. This is a good book and I recommend it to all.

This is perhaps the finest small collection of horror stories available in any book. This work features excellent introductory commentary to each tale. Editor Charles A. Coulombe has both intelligence and taste, and his curious selections bare no obvious common thread save one: each author of the stories contained here was not writing merely to thrill, but also to warn. For the arc of each selection is that both the editor and the authors here have a true and healthy respect for the supernatural, and acknowledge there is an evil side to it, and that the evil side is neither friendly nor pretty, but in fact is hell-bound. In addition, unlike Russell Kirk's admirable works in "Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology Of Ghostly Tales" that ultimately are moral tales, not ghost stories, Coulombe's selections have less predictable endings and allow for ambiguity in whether good triumphs over evil. For simple "good" does not always triumph over complex evil, rather, the supernatural source of these horrors needs something far more powerful than mere human good to be defeated. And the source of that power is supernatural also, and divine. Coulombe's selections, therefore, frighten us at a much deeper level than the gore and anarchy, or Lovecraft re-stated, that passes for "horror" today, but like Kirk Coulombe's selections also instruct the orientation of dimensions of our selves. But Coulombe's selections are superior to Kirk's works, and point to a challenging Platonic ultra-realism where the reader remains unsettled and seeks real solace outside the fictional landscape. Only good horror tales can do that, and Coulombe has found them.