Euan’s Reviews > The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories > Status Update

The White Wyrak by Stefan Grabinski (1921)- a simple story about the discovery of and fight against a soot monster

Unseen - Unfeared by Francis Stevens (1919)- A neat story of a horrible discovery about the world made by a photographer experimenting with new ways of development, wit an ambiguous ending.

In the Penal Colony by Kafka (1919)- an excellent short story in laborious detail about an intricately complicated and gruesome execution machine.

The Vegetable Man by Luigi Ugolini (1917)- a story of a terrible encounter and transformation with a plant-animal of the Amazon. Short but sweet

The Dissection by Georg Heym (1913)- a very short, but very good, vivid, phantasmagorical autopsy.

The Spider by Hanna Heinz Ewers (1915)- a good, tragic story of a young man in Paris who thinks HE will be the one to resist the deadly phenomenon of this room...

The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore (1916)- a very well written gothic story of a haunted palace in India, but with a dissatisfyingly abrupt ending

How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles by Lord Dunsany (1912)- just two pages, yet excellent. It felt like the stories I've loved from Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance (despite maybe[?] being set on Earth).

The Man in the Bottle by Gustav Meyrink (1912)- a really good story about a fête turned weird and macabre.

Srendi Vashtar by Saki (1910)- not too sure why this was here, tbh. It was good, but didn't seem too weird or supernatural. A very short story of a boy in what I think was British India.

Casting the Runes by M. R. James (1911)- this was excellent. A fearful story of unexplained malice, that stays unexplained and doesn't go the way these things usually do.

The Screaming Skull by Francis Crawford (1908)- A good ghost story, less about the actual supernatural and more about the terror and madness of the haunted man.

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood (1907)- I've read this one before. An excellent horror novella, with a great use of the numinous and the idea that knowing less is sometimes more scary.

I've read a few of these stories before; Kubin, Krohn, Blackwood, Dunsany. But I'm thinking of a tale or two a night, and I think I will be edified.

The "Foreweird" is by Michael Moorcock- which accelerates Elric as "the big one" I haven't got to yet. Not only is he just incredibly knowledgeable about the genre, he's been around from Peake and Leiber to nowadays.