Customer Reviews

Black Veil & Other Tales (Mystery & the Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

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After reading half this book, I was going to give it only one star. Fortunately, I kept reading; the better stories are all clustered at the back of the book. I gave it three stars because many of the stories are only fair or even poor--a couple, such as 'The Curious Activities of Basil Thorpenden,' could best be described as fantasies or reveries, and one, 'The Necromancer,' is a jingoistic, cartoonish Victorian version of James Bond.
Overall, the stories are just okay. If you enjoy Victorian and Edwardian settings you'll probably like them but I think there are better collections available. One thing I did like was the cover art. What I took to be a monk standing in a cemetery in the small photo shown on Amazon turned out to be Death, with his scythe, standing on a hill and staring down at a sunlit village. I had never heard of the artist, listed as the late Max Wislicenus (1861-1957), and enjoyed seeing his work. The oil painting, 'Musing Death, is apparently in the collection of a German museum, the Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany.