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Arbor House Celebrity Book of Horror Stories
Vincent Price, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Orson Welles, John Irving, and fifteen other conoisseurs of terror and the macabre introduce their favorite spine tinglers
- GenresShort StoriesHorror
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
58 people want to read
About the author
Martin H. Greenberg
909 books164 followersMartin Harry Greenberg was an American academic and speculative fiction anthologist. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. In addition, he was a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel.
For the 1950s anthologist and publisher of Gnome Press, see Martin Greenberg.
For the 1950s anthologist and publisher of Gnome Press, see Martin Greenberg.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 22, 2016
Note, July 22, 2016: I edited this review just now to correct a typo.
Given the "hook" for this anthology --stories chosen by a score of diverse celebrities-- one might expect the quality of the selections to be even more wildly uneven than is usually the case with multi-author collections. Actually, however, while some choices are less effective than others, their overall quality tends to be quite good; out of all 20, only Oates' pointless and incomprehensible "Queen of the Night" was a flop. The tone of most of them is dark; but in a few cases the horror element turns out to be only apparent rather than real, making for an exercise in gallows humor, and in a couple of stories the ghostly presence is beautiful and poignant, not menacing. Besides those named in the above description, the authors represented include H. P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain, A. Merritt, M. R. James, and W. W. Jacob.
Fully half of the stories are supernatural fiction, if, as I do, you interpret the disputed ones as actually supernatural. Classics such as "The Turn of the Screw," "The Monkey's Paw," "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," and "Lukundoo" appear along with such modern chillers as Richard Matheson's "Prey," Lisa Tuttle's "Sun City" (which draws on ancient Mexican mythology), and King's "The Mangler," which makes the idea of demon-possessed laundry equipment perfectly credible. One of my favorites is Merritt's "Three Lines of Old French," which was my first real exposure to his work.
Horrific science fiction is represented by Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time," and the surreal by John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio." In the realm of descriptive fiction, homicidal insanity rears its head here more than once; but it's supplemented by the horrors of the Inquisition ("The Pit and the Pendulum") and in Gardner McKay's "In the Rose Garden," by the theme of "man [or in this case woman] vs. nature" --with the score definitely running in nature's favor. All in all, this is an anthology well worth reading!
Given the "hook" for this anthology --stories chosen by a score of diverse celebrities-- one might expect the quality of the selections to be even more wildly uneven than is usually the case with multi-author collections. Actually, however, while some choices are less effective than others, their overall quality tends to be quite good; out of all 20, only Oates' pointless and incomprehensible "Queen of the Night" was a flop. The tone of most of them is dark; but in a few cases the horror element turns out to be only apparent rather than real, making for an exercise in gallows humor, and in a couple of stories the ghostly presence is beautiful and poignant, not menacing. Besides those named in the above description, the authors represented include H. P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain, A. Merritt, M. R. James, and W. W. Jacob.
Fully half of the stories are supernatural fiction, if, as I do, you interpret the disputed ones as actually supernatural. Classics such as "The Turn of the Screw," "The Monkey's Paw," "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," and "Lukundoo" appear along with such modern chillers as Richard Matheson's "Prey," Lisa Tuttle's "Sun City" (which draws on ancient Mexican mythology), and King's "The Mangler," which makes the idea of demon-possessed laundry equipment perfectly credible. One of my favorites is Merritt's "Three Lines of Old French," which was my first real exposure to his work.
Horrific science fiction is represented by Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time," and the surreal by John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio." In the realm of descriptive fiction, homicidal insanity rears its head here more than once; but it's supplemented by the horrors of the Inquisition ("The Pit and the Pendulum") and in Gardner McKay's "In the Rose Garden," by the theme of "man [or in this case woman] vs. nature" --with the score definitely running in nature's favor. All in all, this is an anthology well worth reading!
October 6, 2007
There's a few good stories in here that usually don't see the light of day, King's "The Mangler" is here, as well as an unusual E.A.Poe story and more. Probably hard to find these days, but if you need a primer to horror fiction, this is a great place to start.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews