Customer Reviews

Haunted Houses: The Greatest Stories

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A very uneven collection of stories where some truly horrific classics are nearly overshadowed by the unfortunate inclusion of more contemporary 'literary' shorts. Definitely not a book to be read cover-to-cover, but the classics are well-worth the price.

In "Haunted Houses: The Greatest Stories", Martin H. Greenberg has collected a few old favorites, e.g. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Rats in the Walls" by H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not an avid Lovecraftian, but I like this story for its sheer awfulness. Just when the reader feels that the unlucky inheritor of Lovecraft's mansion has suffered enough, something worse happens to him. "The Judge's House" by Bram Stoker (rats figure prominently in this story, too) is another mouldy oldie but goodie. It has always reminded me of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street", although I think Le Fanu's story is the scarier of the two.

There are also some good not-so-collected stories by Ruth Rendell and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. My favorite is "The Tearing of Greymare House" by Michael Reeves. It piles on so much horror that I had to put the story down for awhile before I could read to the end. I think Reeves 'out-Kings' Stephen King in this last selection of the book. Kudos to Martin H. Greenberg for searching out good haunted house stories that haven't yet been over-collected.

This book was published in 1997 and contained 16 short stories by as many authors. There were 11 writers from the U.S., 3 from Great Britain (Hugo B. Cave, Robert Aickman, Ruth Rendell) and 2 from Ireland (Bram Stoker, Elizabeth Bowen).

There were two stories from the 1890s and two from the 1920s, with the rest from the 1940s to 80s. Half of the stories were from the 1970s and 80s.

The oldest writers were Stoker (1847-1912), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The youngest were Jack L. Chalker (1944-2005), Edward Bryant (1945-) and Michael Reaves (1950-). Others included Bowen, Cave, Robert Bloch, Aickman, Rendell and Joyce Carol Oates.

This collection had a little bit of everything. Classics that were more or less traditional horror (Stoker, Gilman) and early weird horror (Lovecraft). Writers focused on the atmospheric and psychological (Bowen, Aickman, Oates) and older and younger authors more inclined toward pulp, including those who wrote also in the SF, fantasy or mystery genres (Cave, Bloch, Nolan, Slesar, Rendell, Grant, Bryant, Chalker, Reaves).

Stories enjoyed included the one by Chalker, because of an SF dimension it added to the haunted house tale, making a haunting the outcome of an intergalactic struggle. And the one by Aickman, which seemed to be about the burdens of parents and children; not his best story ever read, but still strange, open-ended and memorable. Most of the pulp tales were relatively crude by comparison, except for ones by Rendell and Reaves, which involved a more traditional haunting with a twist and a contractor determined to demolish a haunted house.

Many great tales of haunted houses were missing from this book of the "greatest stories," a number of them from earlier years, by writers like Poe, Wells, James, Landon, Blackwood, Onions, Benson, De La Mare and Burrage. Still, this collection contained a few good tales.