Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology [Hardcover]

Peter Straub (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2008

From the incomparable master of horror and suspense comes an electrifying collection of contemporary literary horror, with stories from twenty-five writers representing today’s most talented voices in the genre.

Horror writing is usually associated with formulaic gore, but New Wave horror writers have more in common with the wildly inventive, evocative spookiness of Edgar Allan Poe than with the sometimes-predictable hallmarks of their peers. Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.

Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.

Crossing boundaries and packed with imaginative chills, Poe’s Children bears all the telltale signs of fearless, addictive fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Anyone concerned about the future of horror will find plenty of reassurance in this outstanding reprint anthology showcasing short fiction by today's best writers in the genre. Straub (The Throat) skillfully varies tempo and style, mixing stories of psychological terror with more traditional ghostly tales. Thomas Tessier puts a fresh spin on the empty old house theme in the memorable In Praise of Folly, in which the lonely protagonist pursues his fascination with bizarre structures to the Adirondacks. Tessier subtly raises chills even as the tale proceeds to its inevitable and dark conclusion. Another winner is Dan Chaon's The Bees, a powerful account of a man haunted by mistakes of the past. Ramsey Campbell's terrifying The Voice of the Beach echoes Algernon Blackwood's classic The Willows, with its account of two friends' fateful encounter with a remote beach that may be an entry point to another dimension. Aimed at a general audience, this volume also includes works by Stephen King, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link and Joe Hill. (Nov.)
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From School Library Journal

With an introduction by the much honored Straub (Ghost Story), this collection can be dubbed New Wave horror, considering that most of its 24 stories were published fairly recently and it includes contributions by celebrity horror writers. The tales mostly eschew buckets of blood, instead employing mood and suggestion in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe. "Little Red's Tango," Straub's lengthy quasigospel of a record-collecting obsessive, complete with beatitudes and a seductive demon, ably represents the editor's definition of New Wave horror. All the stories honor Poe, like the moody, contagious delusions of Stephen King's "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet." The genre can be literary, as exemplified by Tia V. Travis's vengeful "The Kiss," Thomas Tessier's surprising "In Praise of Folly," and, probably the most demonstrably Poe-like, Ramsey Campbell's "The Voice of the Beach," featuring a neurasthenic narrator, suffocating suggestibility, and nearly palpable imagery. Brian Evenson's creepy "Body" and Dan Chaon's touching "The Bees" culminate in the horror of bad deeds catching up. The other stories included are without exception excellent. Recommended for all libraries.—Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ.
Stanislaus, Stockton

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 Reprint edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385522835
• ISBN-13: 978-0385522830
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The author of the critically acclaimed Heart-Shaped Box and 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill is a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and a past recipient of the Ray Bradbury Fellowship. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals and Year's Best collections. He calls New England home.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great horror collection, November 4, 2008

By 

Robert Busko (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (Hardcover)

Poe's Children: The New Horror, an Anthology edited by Peter Straub is a terrific collection of short stories by a varied collection of authors. Straub includes one of his own stories, Little Red's Tango, a story that is sure to grab the reader's attention. I have to admit that I had a little difficulty getting into the rhythm of the story, but once I did I found Little Red's Tango to be truly worthwhile. Also included is a great story by Stephen King, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, another story dealing with an author who is convinced that his typewriter is possessed. I think this is King at is "short story" best.

I was also pleased to see that Neil Gaiman was included with his October in the Chair. Here's a list of all the stories included in Poe's Children:

The Bees Dan Chaon
Cleopatra Brimstone Elizabeth Hand
The Man on the Ceiling Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
The Great God Pan M. John Harrison
The Voice of the Beach Ramsey Campbell
Body Brian Evenson
Louise's Ghost Kelly Link
The Sadness of Detail Jonathan Caroll
Leda M. Rickert
In Praise of Folly Thomas Tessier
Plot Twist David J. Schow
The Two Sams Glen Hirshberg
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story Thomas Ligotti
Unearthed Benjamin Percy
Gardner of Heart Bradford Morrow
Little Red's Tango Peter Straub
The Ballad of the Flixible Bullet Stephen King
20th Century Ghost Joe Hill
The Green Glass Sea Ellen Klages
The Kiss Tia V. Travis
Black Dust Graham Joyce
October in the Chair Neil Gaiman
Missolonghi 1824 John Crowley
Insect Dreams Rosilind Palermo Stevenson

Also included at the end is a brief biography of each of the authors.

I suspect that like many readers, I have just a wee bit of difficulty reading when the story/author changes. Authors write with their own cadence. It always takes me a page or two to get in step, but other than that, I look forward to new anthologies, especially in the horror genre.

The best story in the collection, in my opinion only has to be October in the Chair by Gaiman, followed closely by Cleopatra's Brimstone. Picking these over the others is really pretty arbitrary since all of the stories are grabbers.

All things considered, Poe's Children is a unique collection by a diverse group of authors.
I highly recommend.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars All right, if you don't mind wading, December 10, 2010

By 

Thomas Penname "maarow" (Plainfield, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poe's Children: The New Horror (Paperback)

There are two problems with Poe's Children, a collection edited by Peter Straub. One is inherent to all anthologies composed of different authors: you aren't going to like everyone.

The second problem is the editing. The stories have all been previously published, so the words haven't been tampered with. But Poe's Children is an example of how the reader's perception of individual stories can be influenced within the context of their order within an anthology. Stories are placed in sort of thematic chunks that in theory seems like a good idea but in practice gets to feeling rather redundant. By the third story in a row about a protagonist trying to cope with the death of a loved one ("The Two Sams," "Unearthed," "Gardener of Heart") you're sick of grieving heroes. It's unfair to the individual merits of each story to lump them together so you can only really see their similarities rather than their differences, and in this capacity I feel Straub did his authors a disservice.

Of 24 stories there were only two I loved unreservedly. Twentieth Century Ghost, by Joe Hill, is a brooding modern Gothic piece about a haunted theater. (Ghosts always seem to haunt theaters, don't they?) And Louise's Ghost is dark, funny, incisive, bizarre, and heartbreaking--in other words, a Kelly Link story. I highly recommend short story collections by either author.

Stories that I enjoyed: "The Sadness of Detail," by Jonathan Caroll, was good, and refreshingly brief, an existentialist validation of art with disturbing theological implications. "The Bees" is a good story about past regrets that uses genre elements as a metaphor, though it seems almost like an afterthought. "In Praise of Folly" is a brief story with an obvious cymbal clash climax, which works because it doesn't overstay its welcome. I rather liked "The Kiss," about a woman coming to terms with her infamous jazz-singing Jezebel mother's untimely death. "The Green Glass Sea" is a stomach-churning exercise in dramatic irony about a vacation to a nuclear bomb test site. David Schow has fun with "Plot Twist," a study of survival in the face of personality clash for three immature adults on an aborted vacation to Vegas. "Missolonghi 1824" is a pretty neat story of the long-ago and far away and forgotten, when Lord Byron happens upon a captured Greek god. And "Gardener of Heart" is a story of going home again, as the protagonist returns to his hometown to bury his twin sister.

The rest is a mishmash of varying degrees of quality. "The Voice of the Beach" is pretty typical neo-Lovecraftian gobbledygook of the sort that Ramsey Campbell is known for; it's well-written but personally I don't have much fascination for the spaces between reality that Lovecraft fans seem to embrace. "The Great God Pan," "The Man on the Ceiling," and "Body" are another unofficial trio, this time united by surrealism and ambiguity. I don't mind ambiguity, in fact I rather enjoy it, but with all these stories I felt like the authors didn't know any more than I did and just wanted an excuse to connect vague ideas.

"Black Dust," "The Two Sams," and "Unearthed" are perfectly functional but none of them really stood out to me. I like the iconography of "Cleopatra Brimstone" but it was overlong and felt random at points; what was the meaning of all the S&M counterculture apart from a superficial representation of character development? "Insect Dreams" has some interesting ideas and touches on a true horror (slavery) in a way that doesn't feel cheap, but it could have been briefer. And King's early piece "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" just doesn't do anything new.

"Notes on the Writing of Horror" is long-winded and dull. "Little Red's Tango" is sporadically intriguing but ultimately I failed to grasp the point. "Leda" is just bizarre. And "October in the Chair" was disappointing. Neil Gaiman is my favorite author and I really like the device of having the months gathered around a campfire to tell tales, but that same device also felt like a meager justification allowing the story-within-a-story to remain unfinished.

Is the collection worth checking out? More than definitely. But don't expect a grand slam of every story.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A quality anthology of horror short stories, October 26, 2008

By 

Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (Hardcover)

Peter Straub selects 24 short stories that represent "the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades." The crossover between works usually classified as fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres and those considered to be literary, he asserts, "erases boundaries and blurs distinctions."

Two of the better tales are Stephen King's "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" (1984)--a story about the genesis of insanity, featuring a writer who suffers from the paranoid delusion that an imp inhabits his typewriter--and Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone" (2001), a story about an entomologist who is sexually assaulted and wreaks her revenge on men by "collecting" them in bizarre fashion.

King and Hand, plus 22 other New Wave horror writers, exhibit telltale affinities with the spooky imagination of Edgar A. Poe.

If you are a fan of horror stories written by inventive wordsmiths, this quality work is just your cup of tea!

About the author: Peter Straub is the author of 17 novels, including Ghost Story and Koko, as well as two collaborations with Stephen King. Winner of eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, two world Fantasy Awards, and both a Lifetime Achievement Award and election as a Grand Master from the Horror Writers Association. He lives in New York City.