Classic Tales of Horror - Volume 1

by Adèle Hartley (Editor)

This first collection of classic stories contains familiar and rare gems including: The Ghostly Rental - Henry James Markheim - Robert Louis Stevenson The Horla - Guy de Maupassant The Dream Woman - W Wilkie Collins Confession Found in a Prison - Charles Dickens Silence - Leonid Andreyev The Withered Arm - Thomas Hardy The Mysterious Mansion - Honore de Balzac Transformation - Mary Shelley The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe Some Terrible Letters - James Hogg Lost Face - Jack London True Relation of the Apparition - Daniel Defoe The Man and the Snake - Ambrose Bierce The Blast of the Book - G K Chesterton.

Genres: Short Stories

251 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 2006

Reviews

[Timea Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its hard to review a short story collection as I have different opinions on all the works.

Averaged out the stories are pretty good, some (tell-tale heart) are better than others (letters from Scotland). But I did notice that the definition of horror has changed majorly over time, in fact I wouldn’t consider these that horrify. They’re pretty tame stories that are often afraid to go the extra scary mile. For example, there’s a story where the character is premised dead but is just unconscious instead of him being hurried alive (which is genuinely terrifying) he just wakes up. I would say say some of these stories would be considered eerie but I feel, when compared to modern day horror, these are very tame.

[Roma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories are creepy. Some stories are kind of horrors in a dramatic way. And the classic way it is being told. The whole book is enjoyable.

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not so much that this is a bad book, more that these are all just old out of copyright works that are more spooky stories than horror.