Weird Tales

Absolutely outstanding anthology of Weird Tales reprints. A door stop at nearly 600 pages. Kaye has done his homework and picked excellent (mostly) but more obscure stories, many by authors I didn’t really know. Even when he picks from the well known, he picks the lesser anthologized stories. In addition, while the bulk of the stories are from the classic era, Kaye doesn’t confine himself exclusively to this era but picks some gems from later incarnations of the magazine.

Includes short introductions to authors and stories, two appendices, and a further reading suggestion.

This is an anthology of excellent stories, most from the mid-twentieth century; the rest from earlier times, mostly from the nineteenth century. I don't think they are the very best stories from Weird Tales magazine. Those stories, I believe, were published in the original Weird Tales anthology. But these are very good stories by authors such as Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Lieber, Seabury Quinn and William Tenn among many others. There is considerable other information in the foreword and the appendices that will be of interest to weird tale readers.

This is a quality anthology of some of the best writers in the mid-20th century, i.e., Ray Bradbury, Fritzz Lieber Jr., Edgar Allan Poe, Gustav Flaubert (okay, the last two are not the 20th century), theodore sturgeon, and mister Lovecraft and his circle of writers. There is an introduction called "Eyrie" that tells the tale of Weird Tales from its volume one, number one issue throughn to when this anthology was printed. In fact, the magazine is called "the magazine that won't ever die." If you want to know where to read other Weird Tales, there is a bibliography at the back. Also at the back is an essay by one of tghe early editors of the magazine entitled "Why there is 'Weird Tales'". It makes the point htat these tales could not have show more published anywhere else as publishers in the 1930s and 1940's were locked into genre books....westerns and detective specifically. Even today, 2009, there is a tendency to lump writers as a "horror" (Lovecraft), "western (L'amour), crime and drama (MacDonald) science fiction (Clarke). I will fight any body in or out of the business who tries to shove me into a genre , although I think I might do best in crime and social non-fiction. show less

one of my favorites; provides a good diet in a drought of creepy writers.