The Weird — Strange and Dark Stories
What a whopper! The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer and subtitled “A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories†weighs in at over 1100 pages (published by Corvus for just £25).
The publicity bumf says: “Over a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all know genre boundaries.†Did it? Does this book? Judging by its contents, it certainly comes up to the mark. There are over a hundred stories in this thick volume, by the likes of Algernon Blackwood, M R James, Franz Kafka, H P Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake, George R R Martin, Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, Stephen King… The list goes on and on.
Topping and tailing this book are a Foreweird (!) by Michael Moorcock and an Afterweird (!) by China Mieville. Silly spellings beside, this is a tasty meal for lovers of the dark, strange and weird.
One would hope a kindle edition is in the works for those of us who don’t relish the RSI pain in the wrist from holding the thing! 😀