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Post by dem bones on Jan 9, 2012 16:14:04 GMT
Otto Penzler (ed) - Zombies: A Compendium of the Living Dead (Corvus, 2011: originally US, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Sept. 2011) Otto Penzler - Introduction
W. B. Seabrook - Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields David A. Riley - After Nightfall Hugh B. Cave - Mission To Margal Chet Williamson - The Cairnwell Horror Arthur Leo Zagat - Crawling Madness Lisa Tuttle - Treading The Maze Karen Haber - Red Angels Michael Marshall Smith - Later Vivian Meik - White Zombie Guy de Maupassant - Was It A Dream? Steve Rasnic Tem - Bodies And Heads Dale Bailey - Death And Sufferage Henry Kuttner - The Graveyard Rats Edgar Allan Poe - The Facts In The Case of M. Valdemar Yvonne Navarro - Feeding The Dead Inside Charles Birkin - Ballet Negre Geoffrey A Landis - Dead Right Graham Masterton - The Taking of Mr. Bill Jack D‘Arcy - The Grave Gives Up H. P. Lovecraft - Herbert West: Reanimator H. P. Lovecraft - Pickman's Model Robert Bloch - Maternal Instinct Kevin J. Anderson - Bringing The Family Richard Laymon - Mess Hall J. Sheridan Le Fanu - Schalken The Painter Thorpe McClusky - While Zombies Walked Mary A. Turzillo - April Flowers, November Harvest Mort Castle - The Old Man And The Dead Henry S. Whitehead - Jumbee Peter Tremayne - Marbh Bheo Thomas Burke - The Hollow Man Anthony Boucher - They Bite Gahan Wilson - Come One, Come All Ramsey Campbell - It Helps If You Sing R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Ghouls Seabury Quinn - The Corpse-Master F. Marion Crawford - The Upper Berth Ralston Shields - Vengeance Of The Living Dead Harlan Ellison & Robert Silverberg - The Song The Zombie Sang John H. Knox - Men Without Blood Uel Key - The Broken Fang Theodore Sturgeon - It Day Keene - League Of The Grateful Dead Garry Kilworth - Love Child Edith & Ejler Jacobson - Corpses On Parade Richard Christian Matheson - Where There's A Will Michael Swanwick - The Dead Manly Wade Wellman - The Song of The Slaves H. P. Lovecraft - The Outsider Robert R. McCammon - Eat Me Joe R. Lansdale - Deadman's Road Robert E. Howard - Pigeons From Hell Scott Edelman - Live People Don't Understand August Derleth & Mark Schorer - The House In The Magnolias Stephen King - Home Delivery Arthur J. Burks - Dance Of The Damned Theodore Roscoe - Z Is For ZombieFollowing 2009's infeasibly huge The Vampire Archives , "The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published", Otto's back to dispense similar treatment to the dead who walk. 800 plus pages comprising 57 stories - it really should be the kind of thing to set the pulses racing, even if it is for the most part, a zombiie anthology culled from Mr. Penzer's favourite zombie anthologies. By my reckoning, he's resurrected at least ten from Stephen Jones' Mammoth Book Of Zombies, Seven - of twelve - from Haining's Zombie: Tales Of The Walking Dead, Five from Skipp & Spector's Book Of The Dead (and two from the sequel), plus three from The Ultimate Zombie. That said, most, if not all of the aforementioned, are out of print and some of the less familiar items - the very welcome shudder pulp items for example - aren't that easy to find elsewhere. But this wouldn't be Vault if we didn't moan incessantly about everything and nothing, so have to say I would much prefer The Zombie Compendium if it were doled out over three or four manageable 200 pagers! Excellent selection, mind.
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 9, 2012 16:45:17 GMT
Hate to be a niggler, but my story's After Nightfall, not After Midnight. Just got my copy in the post today - bought from Amazon. No official notification to me of this UK reprint (and retitling) of the anthology.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 9, 2012 18:25:51 GMT
Hate to be a niggler, but my story's After Nightfall, not After Midnight. Just got my copy in the post today - bought from Amazon. No official notification to me of this UK reprint (and retitling) of the anthology. Glad to see it's not just me who lacks professionalism! and After Nightfall is perhaps my favourite of your stories after The Farmhouse First I knew of the UK edition was a few days before Christmas in F*rbidd*en Planet. Even a few years back I'd have gone 'phwoar!' and skipped to the till before even checking the price, but must be getting jaded because all I could think was 'you are too fat for my liking and I have already sampled the majority of your joys, including, if I am not very much mistaken, the shudder pulp reprints.' I passed on The Vampire Archives for much the same reason, but this looks the better of the two, if only because Mr. Penzler has cast his net wider than just a few familiar theme antho's. No bibliography this time?
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 9, 2012 20:19:26 GMT
No bibliography, but there are some nice comments about each writer before their stories. Otto was kind enough to mention our "charming" bookshop and to quote Hugh Lamb about my story from The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. The UK edition not only has a much better cover, but is printed on much better paper too. Although the cover price is a hefty £19.99, it's available from Amazon for £11.59, free postage, which is what I paid. Not bad for a book this size.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 9, 2012 21:27:21 GMT
No bibliography, but there are some nice comments about each writer before their stories. Otto was kind enough to mention our "charming" bookshop and to quote Hugh Lamb about my story from The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. " .. the nearest literature has yet come to creating George Romero's cinematic effects in words." I guess most horror authors would be quite pleased with that. Without wanting to drag us off topic (drags us off topic), was very pleased to land this for 25p in my friend the-back-of-the-van-man's super January sale yesterday. Now here's an example of recycling to the point of mania! Martin H. Greenberg (ed.) - Children Of The Night: Stories of Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves & 'Lost Children' (Cumberland House, 1999) Introduction
Suzy McKee Charnas - Boobs ( The New Hugo Winners: Volume III, 1994) Larry Segriff - Specters In The Moonlight ( Phantoms of the Night, 1996) Charles de Lint - There's No Such Thing ( Vampires, 1991) J. S. Le Fanu - The Child That Went With The Fairies ( Nursery Crimes, 1993) Al Sarrantonio - Wish ( Nursery Crimes, 1993) Lee Hoffman - The Third Nation ( Confederacy of the Dead, 1993) Fritz Leiber - The Girl With The Hungry Eyes ( Vamps: An Anthology Of Female Vampire Stories, 1987) Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Food Chain ( Sisters of the Night, 1995) Josepha Sherman - The Magic Stealer ( Vampires, 1991) Cyril M. Kornbluth - The Words Of Guru ( Devil Worshippers, 1990) Orson Scott Card - The Lost Boys ( Back From The Dead, 1991) Author BiographiesBlurb: Frightening, Heart-Stopping, and Often- Shocking... Children Of The Night.
The children in the eleven stories collected in this volume have one thing in common: They are affected by the fears of all mankind, children and adults alike. Most know how to handle the dangers that befall them. How they handle these crises — or get help in handling them — may surprise you.
In truth, "the children in the eleven stories collected in this volume", etc, have something else in common: they'd recently appeared in anthologies co-edited by Marty Greenberg! I've said it before but it bears repeating: not for nothing was the late Mr. Greenberg dubbed "the American Peter Haining"! Not that any of the above is intended as a slight. I was delighted to find it and, on the strength of the five stories read, it's a decent selection, nicely packaged, comes in at a manageable 225 pages. For all that Zombie: Compendium represents good value even at cover price, am thinking maybe some of us would be more inclined to go for it if the same contents were split over three uniform paperbacks?
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 10, 2012 11:50:49 GMT
Not that any of the above is intended as a slight. Like i said, i was delighted to find it and, on the strength of the five stories i've read, it's a decent selection, nicely packaged, comes in at a manageable 225 pages. For all that Zombie: Compendium represents good value even at cover price, i'm thinking maybe some of us would be more inclined to go for it if the same contents were split over three uniform paperbacks? I'm with you there. The heyday of the anthologies was back when Derleth, Haining, Lamb, etc could bring out a nice 250-300 page anthology with a mixture of old and a few new stories. They were manageable, usually had brilliant covers, and were easy to get through. I must admit these 800 page tomes are a bit overfacing. And heavy! The British version of Otto's book is quite a weight. (The American one, printed on an odd, very cheap paper, isn't as bad in that respect, I must admit.)
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jan 10, 2012 11:53:02 GMT
How is "The Upper Berth" a zombie story? Just to mention one example.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jan 11, 2012 3:44:53 GMT
I must admit these 800 page tomes are a bit overfacing. And heavy! There have been a heap of huge horror anthologies in recent times - it's like Back the Future with those massive 1930s doorstops. As JoJo points out, Penzler has a pretty broad definition of zombie - like Aickman's concept of the ghost story.
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 11, 2012 11:17:46 GMT
I must admit these 800 page tomes are a bit overfacing. And heavy! There have been a heap of huge horror anthologies in recent times - it's like Back the Future with those massive 1930s doorstops. As JoJo points out, Penzler has a pretty broad definition of zombie - like Aickman's concept of the ghost story. Despite the spate of "zombie" films over the past thirty or forty years, I still view zombies as being connected with Voodoo and Haiti. One of the last true zombie movies would, for me, be Hammer's Plague of the Zombies, which had all the right elements. When I originally wrote my own contribution to this anthology many years ago I would never have imagined calling it a zombie story. That would have seemed to me ridiculous at the time. I'm not really sure why this term has become so all-encompassing as to include any and every reference to a dead body coming back to action (if not life)!
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Post by paulfinch on Jan 11, 2012 11:29:15 GMT
I suppose by some of these definitions you could argue that many of MR James's stories are zombie stories, as they often involve reanimated heaps of bones and sacking, or, at the very least, 'ghosts' that can cause physical harm to the protagonists.
But the real problem with a massive anthology like this is that I've already got too many of the stories on my shelves to fork out for it. Shame.
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Post by noose on Jan 11, 2012 11:35:32 GMT
'A Warning to the Curious' appeared in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF ZOMBIES if I remember rightly...
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 11, 2012 11:53:30 GMT
'A Warning to the Curious' appeared in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF ZOMBIES if I remember rightly... My story in the Penzler book, After Nightfall, was Steve Jones' original choice for The Mammoth Book of Zombies till I persuaded him to take an unpublished story instead. I remember being puzzled at the time as to why he considered it a zombie story. The whole genre thing has got very fuzzy round the edges!
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 11, 2012 13:11:35 GMT
I can get quite unreasonably agitated by anthologies with stories that don't fit their supposed theme - there are a few in Jonathan Oliver's recent House of Fear anthology that had me muttering "OK - so where's the effing haunted house?" For me a "zombie" can only ever be a corpse re-animated by sorcery - which probably rules out most of the books, stories and films that use the word.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jan 11, 2012 13:15:57 GMT
There is no reanimated corpse in "The Upper Berth." It is a ghost---with some solidity to it, I grant you, but still a ghost. If it were an actual corpse the implications of the story would be absurd.
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Post by Aaron M on Jan 14, 2012 15:30:35 GMT
Seems kind of a mixed bag this one. I picked up the Black Lizard "Adventure Stories" anthology and was somewhat impressed with the quality and selection (though I had basically none of the stories included in that tome) - this one though does seem to cover a lot of the same ground, even if they are classics.
Not sure I'd consider the Lovecraft stories other than "Re-Animator" zombie tales as well. Kuttner's entry and Landsdale's are both great though (writing this I again wonder if I need to purchase this release as I'm already familiar with what seems to be the "best" in the book).
Can't say I'm a fan of that cover either - prefer the EC-style cover on the (I believe) American release. Is there any artwork inside as well?
- Aaron
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