Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology (2008)

Review: Poe’s Children by Peter Straub.

This is a book of twenty short stories. The book features some creepy, fearful, and some are funny but also a few dreadfully boring. In this collection of stories the author attempted to prove that the horror genre is more than scary and frightening monsters, blood, and gore.

As Peter Straub put together these anthology of other writer’s work I thought he was showing how different this genre spreads over a combination of strange stories that really fits into this category. Some of the stories make sense and others stories leaves the reader wondering what they just read. The thing is that we keep on reading stories like this no matter what the stories are about. ( )

This book raised a difficult question for me. When do you give up on reading an anthology? I believe that I've been reading this book for over a year. I would pick it up, read a story or part of a story, dislike that story, and put the book down. I would want to give up and mark it as Did Not Finish (DNF) but then I would think that just because I disliked one story didn't mean that I would dislike another. So I would try again and do the same process of wanting to give up but not doing so. Some of the stories were too poetic and focused on the moon; at the same time, those stories had no substance, no hook, no story. Some were just boring. Most did not grab my interest. I did find five stories I liked enough to mention below but even two of those were reprints that I read elsewhere. That was another thing that frustrated me. For a book with a subtitle of "The New Horror", most of the stories were copyrighted in 2002 or earlier. As early as 1984 and 1990. Even granting time to pull the stories together and compile the book, that is not very "new" horror (for the original copyright of 2008). So as you can tell, I can't really recommend the book.

"Cleopatra Brimstone" by Elizabeth Hand - An attractive entomologist deals with life, a job in London, some men, and her love of butterflies.

"The Sadness of Detail" by Jonathan Carroll - A woman's drawings help her to accept life and to save the world.

"The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" by Stephen King - The story of a writer who goes mad and the editor who helps him. Told by the same, no-longer-mad editor.

"20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill - A woman's ghost haunts a movie theater.

"October in the Chair" by Neil Gaiman - October tells the story of Runt and Dearly: a young boy and a ghost. ( )

Great pieces by Don Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, the Tems, Thomas Ligotti, Joe Hill and Jonathan Carroll. Really awful stuff from Brian Evenson, Glen Hirshberg, Benjamin Percy and Straub himself. Everything else is just about average. ( )

I tend to read anthologies and short story collections to find new authors in my favorite genres. And, so now, Jonathan Caroll (The Sadness of Detail) and Glen Hirshberg (The Two Sams) are living on my TBR list. Stephen King (The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) and Joe Hill (21st Century Ghost) make appearances as well as a number of other very talented authors in the field of Horror writing. There were only two stories I could not finish and one that I really, really hated. Not bad out of a collection of 25 or so stories. Definitely worth the time and money. ( )

*audio