Tag: horror

Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination

My renewed diligence in reading the physical books I already own has had the unintended consequence of vastly increasing my short story consumption. Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination is the third such anthology I’ve read this year, and might be the last.

This one was a collection that I picked up in my high school thrifting adventures, though I can’t remember if I bought it myself or if my best friend and partner in crime bought it for me on one of our trips out. Regardless, even though I kept putting off reading it, at the same time sentimental value kept me from culling it. (I think it has a companion purchased at the same store, a collection of Russian fiction, but it’s not here. Not sure if I got rid of it, or if it’s still at my parents’ home owing to a delicate physical condition that I wouldn’t trust to international shipping.)

Also, please appreciate that cover art, which has absolutely nothing to do with any of the stories inside.

This anthology was compiled by Philip Van Doren Stern, an academic and Civil War expert remembered today as the author of the short story that went on to become It’s A Wonderful Life. While Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination is maybe around twenty years newer than the other collections I’ve been carting around in my library, in his introduction Van Doren Stern expresses the same uneasy relationship with pulp magazines as Schweikert: those stories are trashy but these stories are high art.

However, since this collection specifically focuses on the fantastic—fantasy, science fiction, horror, and magical realism before the genres had been entirely codefied—Van Doren Stern does have some interesting thoughts about how the fantastic can be used as a means of elevating a story and highlighting the worries and dreams we all have.

Out of the three short story collections I’ve read for this project (the third was another one of my Dede’s but for whatever reason I didn’t note it here?), this one had the best killer/filler ratio. Out of the twenty-one stories in the collection, only three or four were really disappointing. Lord Dunsany‘s “Our Distant Cousins,” already dated by the year of anthologizing (1943), is too old-fashioned to really have any appeal left in the year of Our Lord 2023; Walter de la Mare‘s “All Hallows” is fantastic gothic atmosphere but without much resolution; the same could be said about A. E. Coppard‘s “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” though it’s comic rather than gothic; and the Poe story in the collection (“William Wilson”) doesn’t have the visceral appeal of The Greatest Hits.

In contrast, there were too many really great stories to name them all in a blog post without quickly becoming tedious. Instead, I will limit myself to naming Stella Benson‘s “The Man Who Missed the ‘Bus” as the most unsettling story in the collection and point out that the entire collection is available to borrow at Archive.org.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Another book club book, this time the Discord book club. Turns out if you let me show up once, I never leave. (Well, except that time I dropped in to discuss Solaris and then didn’t attend another meeting until Light From Uncommon Stars.)

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a snappy little collection of short stories from Kim Fu. They all go pretty quick, making this book another member of the illustrious One-Sit Read Club for me. I’m struggling to remember any others except The Crying of Lot 49, but I know there’s at least one more besides. Possibly Kokoro? Honorable mention: The Seep.

As a short story collection, there’s not really any plot to recount. Around half of the stories flirt with science fiction, or speculative fiction, however you want to call it, whether by relying on technology beyond what’s currently available or by inventing scientifically plausible monsters, illnesses, or mutations. Regardless of genre, all of the stories share a deft, light touch that in the end is possibly a bit too light. Few of them have a closed or definitive ending; a bit like Weasels in the Attic, they all have the sensation of a kind of literary show and tell. “Here’s this weird idea I had. Sure is weird, isn’t it? Anyway…” Sometimes this works for the subject matter, but other times it feels a little bit like a cop-out, like Fu couldn’t figure out what the logical conclusion of their idea should be. This was maybe the most frustrating in “#ClimbingNation,” which has enough paydirt drama and conflict set up in just one post-funeral scene to fuel an entire novel (hidden stashes of gold bars! unresolved guilt! mysterious pasts!) but instead simply ends. On the other hand, it works well in “Doll,” where that kind of unresolved tension works because the story is classic, old-school horror straight out of Weird Tales. Then there’s a third class of story where the lack of conclusive ending renders the entire story forgettable. Like, very literally forgettable—in the hour between finishing the book and starting this post, I still had to look up reviews to remind myself of what I had just read.

My personal favorite out of the collection was “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” the first story in the collection and which maybe doomed the other stories by setting expectations too high because it is really, really good. I might have even choked up a bit. And while I don’t know that “Twenty Hours” is necessarily a great story, it perfectly encapsulates a particular mood and dynamic that I recognize from being in a long-term relationship so I’ll credit Fu with that much.

Overall I’m not mad I read it, because Fu has a way with words and it’s a delight to reside in their world, even for those too-brief moments. I expect it’s a bit hard to track down at the moment due to new release hype, but if you come across it in the bookshelves in a year or two it’s worth the browse.