A hundred times over

Last night I read the last of 100 wild little weird tales. It's taken me three years because, even though they're short short stories, it's tough to read too many at one go. There are some gems in the collection, but most are rather formulaic. Plus I only really crave this sort of thing around Halloween and my interest drops off again when Christmas draws near. If there's one thing I took away from this, it's an appreciation for the outstanding authors of the era. Just as reading Eugène Sue deepened monshu's regard for Balzac's genius, wading through dozens of tales from long-forgotten better-than-average pulp writers points up just how much more accomplished Lovercraft, Wellman, and C.A. Smith were than their contemporaries.

For the most part, the rest of the anthology falls into traditional gothic ghost tales (including one from E.F. Benson) and lurid revenge stories, many of them dressed up in ill-fitting European historical garb. (An unexpected number take place in the Low Countries.) There are a few contes cruels translated from the French and a butchered version of Meyrink's Der violette Tod with the framing device inexplicably hacked away. A few may stick with me, but from the remove of a year or more most of the titles don't stir any recognition.

Now for goofy gothic horror I've still got Gombrowicz', which I've been turning to only very occasionally when I've needed a break from Dostoevsky. After that, I may pick up a curious Japanese work which happened to fall into my hand Thursday when I played hooky at the bookstore. I literally only picked it up because it was misshelved. (I can't resist refiling East Asian authors where they belong; while I was at it, I also shifted copies of Soul mountain and Story of the stone.) But the blurb intrigued me so I may give it a shot. The paragraphs are oddly short (mostly a sentence each) and consist mainly of dialogue, so it should be a quick read indeed.