Looking Back - Slightly Chilled

I didn't get as much reading done in Manchester as I would have liked. But this is always the case when there's so much for us to do over there and only four weeks to do it in. I read a lot in terms of newspapers and magazines as there was an awful lot of good material available, but that seemed to interfere with the usual flow of my regular reading.

A book I made reasonable progress with, however, was the American Fantastic Tales volume edited by Peter Straub, the one featuring material From Poe to the Pulps. Every story had something to recommend it but, interestingly, hardly any proved to be genuinely frightening. It wasn't until I was some two-thirds of the way through that I read something that actually got under the old skin, the story in question being Edith Wharton's Afterward. The slow, steady building of unease was done to perfection and I reminded of reading M.R. James as a kid, wanting yet not wanting to read on, knowing that bad dreams would follow. But there wasn't much else that chilled me in that way.

Having said that, the 'pulp' stories at the end of the volume - Derleth, Lovecraft and that mob - which I finished over here in the last few days, were tremendous fun simply as tales. I just enjoyed the sheer verve of the telling.

I'm contemplating moving on now to the second later volume with Straub providing lots of contemporary stuff - including himself and his old mate Stephen King. I suspect there may be some genuine shocks in store. It would nice to be comfortably frightened again.