Customer Reviews

Dark Arrows: Great Stories of Revenge

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Revenge is a theme that has always fascinated and beguiled me, so several years ago I bought this book in order that it's tales might perhaps quell any demons within.

The 18 stories' authors are a good blend of the long-dead and still breathing, the eminent and the obscure, mostly Western, but not all. The famous Lord Dunsany starts things off with an exquisite--if harmless--story to set the table. Faulker, Saki, and some long-dead German named von Kleit proceed to muck things up with three forgettable tales (the first two involving animals) before Frederick Forsyth gets things back on track with "There Are No Snakes In Ireland."

A Canadian (Ken Miller) and the eminent E.L. Doctrow muddle through two forgettable stories before Bram Stoker's entertaining, though predictable, "The Squaw" (which involves yet another animal). Argentinean Isidoro Blaisten and Mexican Edmundo Valades contribute neat little pieces, sandwiching a rather forgettable Rudyard Kipling tale. The Irish author, William Trevor, contributes a brilliant piece of comeuppence in "Torridge," which is followed by a somewhat contrived letter by Kafka's father, as conceived by Nadine Gordimer.

Borges is Borges in "Emma Zunz", and once again, I fail to see what the big deal is. Edgar Allen Poe's "Hop-Frog" is as solid and bloody a tale of revenge you would expect. Then follows the longest piece, by a 19th-century Frenchman, d'Aurevilly, which suffers from being overwritten and overblown (of its time, one suspects). August Derleth's "Miss Esperson" reads like an X-File, but thankfully Roger Louis Steveson's "The Isle of Voices" ends the volume on a sound note. So, pick and choose.