Tales of the Weird

 

A leading dealer in rare books told me recently that supernatural and other weird fiction is highly collectible at present, and a glance at prices on the second hand market confirms this. Luckily, if this kind of writing is your cup of tea, you don't need to break the bank in order to feast on an eclectic mix of short stories (plus the occasional novel), because the British Library's Tales of the Weird is following the Crime Classics list in attracting a wide readership for attractive but competitively priced paperbacks featuring some fascinating writers and stories.

I'm not involved with Tales of the Weird, but I do enjoy reading them and (very occasionally, but perhaps more often in future) writing them. A number of recent titles are well worth looking at, and I'll glance at them briefly today with a view to saying more about one or two entries in the series at a later date.

The Haunted Library, edited by Tanya Kirk, offers a very interesting mix. There are well-known stories such as 'The Tractate Middoth' by M.R. James and also some unexpected contributions - notably 'The Revenant Typewriter', by none other than Penelope Lively, which dates from 1978, and which as Tanya Kirk puts it, shows how the trashy and modern threaten the scholarly and historic.

Phantoms of Kernow: Classic Tales of Haunted Cornwall, edited by Joan Passy, offers another nice, themed mix of the familiar and the deeply obscure. Eden Philpotts' 'The Iron Pineapple' falls into the former category, and there are also stories by such noted authors as Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Quiller-Couch, as well as a story by E.R. Punshon (much better-known as a detective novelist) and several writers otherwise unknown to me. 

The Lost Stradivarius is a short novel by J. Meade Falkner, whose three books (Moonfleet and The Nebuly Coat are the others) are all of high quality, yet very different from each other. I am a Falkner fan and I hope someone reprints The Nebuly Coat before too long, though it's not a tale of weird. In the meantime, this is a story well worth reading - as is the introduction by the doyen of British anthologists, Mike Ashley.