The Raven and the Monkey's Paw: Classics of Horror and Suspense from the Modern Library Review

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The Raven and the Monkey's Paw: Classics of Horror and Suspense from the Modern Library ReviewIn this book you get 8 stories and 8 poems by Edgar Allan Poe and 7 other stories by different authors. These are classic horror stories so they aren't filled with monsters or other types of ghouls and the stories play out slowly. The stories will still give you a more suttle type of terror while reading them. Nothing action pact really happens but it's in the mood of the story that scares the reader. I felt that Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems were better than the other stories because they gave off more of a creepy vibe than the other stories did. The other stories were good but the only one I didn't like too much was "Afterward" because it's too long.

So if you like 18th century gothic horror stories then this is a book for you but if you're more into Stephen King type novels then this book might seem a bit boring.The Raven and the Monkey's Paw: Classics of Horror and Suspense from the Modern Library OverviewThe third in the Modern Library's series of original compilations, The Raven and the Monkey's Paw is a collection of classic tales and poems to engage our fear-seeking senses. The beauty of these stories and poems lies in their readability: ideal for sharing aloud around the campfire or for a quick, thrilling dip . . . under the covers with a flashlight. The writing itself sends as many awe-inspired shivers down the spine as do the ghosts and goblins on these pages. Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the horror story and the chiming lyric poem, opens the volume with his best-loved stories: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Premature Burial," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Berenice," and "Ligeia." Every bit as chilling now as on the day they were written, these tales retain their power to stir the reader again and again. Poe, who was as well known for his poems as for his stories, is also represented by such verse standards as "The Raven," "Lenore," "To Helen," "Ulalume," and "Annabel Lee," among others. Numerous other practitioners of the supernatural story are included: Edith Wharton, with her gripping "Afterward"; Charles Dickens and his famed ghost story "The Signalman"; W. W. Jacobs, with this com-pilation's inspiration, "The Monkey's Paw." Also here are Saki's engrossing "Sredni Vashtar"; O. Henry's story of love lost and hopes dashed, "The Furnished Room"; Wilkie Collins's lively "A Terribly Strange Bed"; and "The Boarded Window," Ambrose Bierce's tale of the bizarre. A year-round collection for reading aloud--and frightening your friends--The Raven and the Monkey's Paw will gratify all manner of thrill-seekers.The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

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Death Mask Review

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Death Mask Review
There are lots of terms that can be used to describe a good horror novel: suspenseful, thrilling, twisted, et cetera. One term that I don't use with many such novels is clever. Yes, they may be well-written, but the plots are often relatively straightforward. Death Mask by Graham Masterton is not only better than the average horror novel, it is more clever than the average one as well.
The heroines of the story are Molly Sawyer and her mother-in-law Sissy. "Heroine" is the proper word: they are both nice, courageous people with no grand emotional baggage to weigh them down. Sissy has psychic talents, primarily used through her tarot cards, and as the story opens, she is foreseeing some bad things. Molly is an artist who every now-and-then does sketch work for the police. This happens after a brutal attack in an elevator of an old Cincinnati skyscraper leaves one man dead and a woman injured.
The wounded woman gives Molly a description of a large and freakish man whose sunburnt visage soon gives him the name of the Red Mask killer. This killer is motivated by revenge, though for what is unclear: whatever the reason, he's not about to stop killing, and he will prove extremely elusive. All this is bad enough, but Sissy and Molly have come to a realization: Molly's artwork is coming off the page and into real life, including her two Red Mask sketches, which means that there isn't one killer but three.
In a way, Death Mask is like Masterton's previous novel, The 5th Witch, which also had police pursuing - and being completely overwhelmed by - supernatural forces, and which depend, to some extent, on a whiter form of witchcraft to offer hope of stopping these forces. Even with these vague similarities, however, Death Mask is original enough, and more importantly, is a really fun read.Death Mask Overview

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Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library) Review

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Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library) ReviewI've read all the stories in this book at least 3 times. Most of the times I skip around, but twice I've read straight through -- the stories are so consistently good, and, though wide ranging, complement each other so well.These are NOT horror stories. Horror (to me, at least) implies not only more explicit violence, but also an attitude that reality is, at core, physically and morally chaotic. "Dark Descent" is a horror anthology -- "Great Tales" is for the most part (although "The Great God Pan" and H.P. Lovecraft's 2 stories provide some exception) more old-fashioned "ghost stories," and what mystery genre critics would categorize as "English cozy": pleasant characters, warm surroundings introduced all the better to scare you with later on. The evil is seen through a hole in the curtain, so to speak, and never engulfs.The first group of stories ("Tale of Terror") are not exactly supernatural, but extremely suspenseful, with wonderful denouements. Poe's "The Facts in the Strange Case of M. Valdemar" is wonderfully horrible - a dying man is hypnotised to keep him alive (it turns out to be a mistake, of course). "Suspicion" by Dorothy Sayers is NOT a murder mystery, but a perfectly built-up tale of suspense. I've read it a dozen times and the pace of the story still catches me. "Home for Christmas," in which a nice doctor kills his bossy wife before leaving on vacation, would make a great Hitchcock movie. "Moonlight Sonata" is the short but shocking story of a man who stays overnight at a friend's house and awakens to an unpleasant visitor (not a ghost, but worse). Despite the emphasis on surprise endings, all of these stories have such great style and atmosphere that they are often, if anything, better the 2nd or 3rd time around.The second group, "Tales of the Supernatural," have all the qualities mentioned above but are more wide ranging in terms of imaginativeness. My Man M.R. James fits right in here, of course, and 2 of his best tales - "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "Casting the Runes" - are featured. Also Guy de Maupassant ("Was It a Dream?", in which a young lover spends the night mourning the death of his mistress in a cemetery, is fabulous). Also Rudyard Kipling; E.F. Benson; Algernon Blackwood ("Ancient Sorceries" features a mild-mannered Englishman oddly drawn to a small French village with a history of witchcraft); and such great titles as "The Screaming Skull" and "The Haunters and the Haunted or The House and the Brain" which, despite the campy names, will leave you far from laughing. There are stories in this section, also, that would better be categorized as fantasy ("The Celestial Omnibus" and "Adam and Eve and Pinch-me"). I liked them a lot even though I don't usually read fantasy. The majority are SCARY, though, and all are well-written by any standard (Henry James gives us "Sir Edmund Orme" and Ernest Hemingway tells of "The Killers").If you like a more modern style, more explicit sex and violence, less atmosphere and more cut-to-the-chase, this book probably isn't for you. But if you like good, old-fashioned, solid, subtle, clever writing, with lots of atmosphere as well as great plotting (and you like to be scared), then this is a must-have.Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library) OverviewWhen this longtime Modern Library favorite--filled with fifty-two stories of heart-stopping suspense--was first published in 1944, one of its biggest fans was critic Edmund Wilson, who in The New Yorker applauded what he termed a sudden revival of the appetite for tales of horror. Represented in the anthology are such distinguished spell weavers as Edgar Allen Poe ("The Black Cat"), Wilkie Collins ("A Terribly Strange Bed"), Henry James ("Sir Edmund Orme"), Guy de Maupassant ("Was It a Dream?"), O. Henry ("The Furnished Room"), Rudyard Kipling ("They"), and H.G. Wells ("Pollock and the Porroh Man"). Included as well are such modern masters as Algernon Blackwood ("Ancient Sorceries"), Walter de la Mare ("Out of the Deep"), E.M. Forster ("The Celestial Omnibus"), Isak Dinesen ("The Sailor-Boys Tale"), H.P. Lovecraft ("The Dunwich Horror"), Dorothy L. Sayers ("Suspicion"), and Ernest Hemingway ("The Killers"). "There is not a story in this collection that does not have the breath of life, achieve the full suspension of disbelief that is so particularly important in [this] type of fiction," wrote the Saturday Review. With an introduction and notes by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise.

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999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense Review

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999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense ReviewOpinion: Short story collections are usually filler reading for me. Read a story in between properly long novels. This book I just read straight through for various reasons. It opens with a good old zombie story that is not my cup of tea, but is well done, "Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue" by Kim Newman. "The Ruins of Contracoeur" by Joyce Carol Oates is one of my favorites. Its a story of a disgraced judge and his family being forced to move in a family inherited mansion out in the country, far from the political world of Washington. The kids have started seeing people without faces prowling around the grounds and children from the neighborhood are suddenly being murdered by a madman. "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Thomas M. Disch is also excellent and slightly suspenseful but not very horrific if you know what I mean. I really like the way this story was unfolded (and I cannot really describe it without giving things away). Another story that I found excellent was "The Grave" by P. D. Cacek. Its a story about a very wierd, psychotic school librarian, her relationship with her mother, and something she found on the way home from school one day, done with enough of realism to make it extremely creepy. "Itinerary" by Tim Powers was interesting but I did not follow it very well. I got lost in the details of this ghostly time-travel story, possibly as a result of my being tired when reading that story. "The Rio Grande Gothic" by David Morrell and "Angie" by Ed Gorman are two more great stories. "Rio Grande is about a cop who gets a little too curious about a certain intersection in Santa Fe where shoes keep appearing in the middle of the road. This was one of the longer stories but was very good. I don't know what to say about "Angie" other than I liked it and that is a little frightening. "The Tree Is My Hat" by Gene Wolfe was the first Wolfe story of any kind I have read. His story was just so-so to me...but in an interesting way. "Hemophage" left me wanting more. This story by Steven Spruill fits between 2 books of a trilogy and it feels like it. I really liked the everyman way that vampires are dealt with. "Rehearsals" by Thomas F. Monteleone was a pretty good about a blue collar worker who never made much of himself and the dreams he had as a youth. What happens to him when he gets a job at a theater as a janitor is pretty cool although not terribly scary. One of my favoritre stories in the collection was the last story "Elsewhere" by William Peter Blatty (The Exocist guy). A realtor gets a very big incentive to sell a dormant house with a haunted reputation. She gathers up some "experts" on hauntings and a writer to spend some nights in the house and prove it isn't so she can sell it. The character interaction is pretty good here, and even more so after the punch is delivered near the end. This story brought to mind a recent movie. So much so that I wonder if the movie got the idea from this story.
Neil Gaiman and Stephen King have stories published in this collection, King's "The Road Virus Heads North" I have read before. Some of the stories that I didn't like or disappointed me were "The Shadow, The Darkness" (too long and boring), "Knocking" (no real punch, just kinda blah), "Growing Things" (short and unscary), and "The Theater" (haunted vegetables above a bookstore. The rest of the stories were average, no real feeling either way for me.
Recommendation: If you are a fan of the genre or of any of these authors, read this. Zombie stories, vampire stories, creatures in the woods stories, evil heart of man stories, suspensful stories, it's all here. It is well worth it with many more likeable stories than not. 4 out of 5 stars.999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense Overview
A ward-winning writer and editor Al Sarrantonio gathers together twenty-nine original stories from masters of the macabre. From dark fantasy and pure suspense to classic horror tales of vampires and zombies, 999 showcases the extraordinary scope of fantastical fright fiction. The stories in this anthology are a relentless tour de force of fear, which will haunt you, terrify you, and keep the adrenaline rushing all through the night.


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Descendant Review

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Descendant ReviewJames Falcon is a young and outwardly unexceptional American but he does have one area of unusual expertise -his grandmother and mother were Romanian in origin and have inculcted in him a deep knowledge of " strigoi"-Romanian undead ,close kin to the nosferatu .He is approached in 1943 by US Intelligence who have use for his knowledge -the Nazis have secured the services of the "strigoi" who are revealing to them the names of key members of several European resistance groups .After basic training he is despatched to Europe in puruit of the strigoi leader -the saturnine Duca .We first see him in full on vampire slaying mode in Antwerp, Belgium but despite success Duca eludes him
We then move to 1957 when he is again pressed into service by US intelligence -Duca was not killed but captured by the US who hoped to enlist his services on their side in the coming conflict with Russia .His plane crashed and when it was recently dicovered Duca was resurrected and is now wreaking havoc in London .Falcon is sent to Britain to co-operate with British Intelligence in tracaking down and killing Duca and his acolytes
The action is swift and bloody but he still finds time for an amorous dalliance with Jill his main contact with the British services and events move to a showdown with Duca on board the "Queen Elizabeth" as it readies for sailing to New York .There is however a bitter sweet codocil to the novel which adds depth to the novel.Duca is a suitably nasty villain and James an engaging hero with a wry sense of humour
The main emphasis is action and this is well described and compelling but there is also some quite culture clash comedy as Falcon struggles to come to terms with British life in the mid 50's -warm beer ,shepherd's pie and draconian licencing laws in pubs
Masteron is a consummate pro and this is a very readable and entertaining book .It is unreservedly recommende to all horror lovers and those enjoying a well plotted and swiftly executed tale by an experienced practitionerDescendant Overview

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