Product Description

From the incomparable master of horror and suspense comes an electrifying collection of contemporary literary horror, with stories from twenty-five writers representing today’s most talented voices in the genre.

Horror writing is usually associated with formulaic gore, but New Wave horror writers have more in common with the wildly inventive, evocative spookiness of Edgar Allan Poe than with the sometimes-predictable hallmarks of their peers. Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.

Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.

Crossing boundaries and packed with imaginative chills, Poe’s Children bears all the telltale signs of fearless, addictive fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #384947 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-14
• Released on: 2008-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385522830
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Anyone concerned about the future of horror will find plenty of reassurance in this outstanding reprint anthology showcasing short fiction by today's best writers in the genre. Straub (The Throat) skillfully varies tempo and style, mixing stories of psychological terror with more traditional ghostly tales. Thomas Tessier puts a fresh spin on the empty old house theme in the memorable In Praise of Folly, in which the lonely protagonist pursues his fascination with bizarre structures to the Adirondacks. Tessier subtly raises chills even as the tale proceeds to its inevitable and dark conclusion. Another winner is Dan Chaon's The Bees, a powerful account of a man haunted by mistakes of the past. Ramsey Campbell's terrifying The Voice of the Beach echoes Algernon Blackwood's classic The Willows, with its account of two friends' fateful encounter with a remote beach that may be an entry point to another dimension. Aimed at a general audience, this volume also includes works by Stephen King, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link and Joe Hill. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
With an introduction by the much honored Straub (Ghost Story), this collection can be dubbed New Wave horror, considering that most of its 24 stories were published fairly recently and it includes contributions by celebrity horror writers. The tales mostly eschew buckets of blood, instead employing mood and suggestion in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe. "Little Red's Tango," Straub's lengthy quasigospel of a record-collecting obsessive, complete with beatitudes and a seductive demon, ably represents the editor's definition of New Wave horror. All the stories honor Poe, like the moody, contagious delusions of Stephen King's "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet." The genre can be literary, as exemplified by Tia V. Travis's vengeful "The Kiss," Thomas Tessier's surprising "In Praise of Folly," and, probably the most demonstrably Poe-like, Ramsey Campbell's "The Voice of the Beach," featuring a neurasthenic narrator, suffocating suggestibility, and nearly palpable imagery. Brian Evenson's creepy "Body" and Dan Chaon's touching "The Bees" culminate in the horror of bad deeds catching up. The other stories included are without exception excellent. Recommended for all libraries.—Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ.
Stanislaus, Stockton

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Peter Straub's revelatory anthology Poe's Children is subtitled "The New Horror," a designation that raises a couple of questions: What exactly is the "new horror?" What makes it different from, or better than, the old stuff? The answers, as Straub notes in his elegant introduction, have their roots in the horror boom that peaked and crashed in the 1980s. That boom began with the immense popular success of such novels as Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), Thomas Tryon's The Other (1971) and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971). Shortly afterward, in 1974, Stephen King published Carrie, launching one of the most successful careers in the history of popular culture. Suddenly, horror was hot, and the public's appetite for "malevolent orphans, haunted brownstones" and -- in Michael McDowell's memorable phrase -- "underwater lesbian Nazi vampire turtles" seemed inexhaustible. But a parade of satanic knockoffs had a deadening effect. Interest in these generic creations gradually declined, and the boom inevitably went bust. The problem lay in the narrow view of horror fiction as a marketing category tied to specific tropes and specific expectations, rather than as a flexible instrument capable of addressing the "essential terror within the human animal." The 24 stories in Poe's Children illuminate that "essential terror" through an impressive, highly personal assortment of perspectives and techniques. The result is a remarkably consistent, frequently unsettling book that does as much to blur the artificial boundary between genre fiction and "literature" as any anthology in living memory. The stories are all of a relatively recent vintage, i.e., post-Carrie. The oldest (and by far the most traditional) is Ramsey Campbell's Lovecraftian novella "The Voice of the Beach," published in 1982. The contributors, who come from all over the demographic map, include several writers with long-term connections to the horror field (King, Campbell, Thomas Tessier, Thomas Ligotti), along with rising stars such as Joe Hill (King's son) and Tia V. Travis. Two respected members of the literary mainstream (Bradford Morrow and Dan Chaon) are present, as are such uncategorizable writers as Jonathan Carroll, Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman. There are almost too many good ones to comment on, but here are a few that struck me with particular force: In Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone," a young American woman moves to England in the aftermath of a brutal rape. Once there, she discovers a latent capacity to effect astonishing -- and lethal -- transformations on the men who come into her life. This tale of predators and prey -- a kind of entomological horror story -- is erotic, disturbing and strangely beautiful. Graham Joyce's "Black Dust" is a subtly written ghost story set in the coal-mining region near Coventry, England. A young boy whose father has been trapped by a cave-in suffers through a protracted rescue effort, in the course of which he comes face-to-face with the massive contradictions of adult behavior. As its title indicates, M. John Harrison's "The Great God Pan" is a modern riff on Arthur Machen's classic tale about an ill-advised attempt to pierce the veil between this world and the next. Harrison's version is both an enigmatic horror story with some truly unsettling images and a grimly affecting portrait of lives scarred by grinding disappointment. Pan makes an appearance of a different sort in John Crowley's "Missolonghi 1824." In this beautifully composed story, the dying Lord Byron remembers a magical encounter with an ancient pagan creature that has come to symbolize the "wild possibility" that animated his life and freed him to pursue his central preoccupations -- poetry and love -- in the face of the impending void. Finally, there is Straub's own contribution, "Little Red's Tango," an impressionistic portrait of a New York City music collector that powerfully reiterates a characteristic theme: the persistence of the sacred in a chaotic, darkening world. Like the best of the stories in this splendid anthology, "Little Red's Tango" transcends genre labels and deserves to be recognized for what it is: first-rate fiction by a first-rate American writer.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A great horror collection
Poe's Children: The New Horror, an Anthology edited by Peter Straub is a terrific collection of short stories by a varied collection of authors. Straub includes one of his own stories, Little Red's Tango, a story that is sure to grab the reader's attention. I have to admit that I had a little difficulty getting into the rhythm of the story, but once I did I found Little Red's Tango to be truly worthwhile. Also included is a great story by Stephen King, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, another story dealing with an author who is convinced that his typewriter is possessed. I think this is King at is "short story" best.

I was also pleased to see that Neil Gaiman was included with his October in the Chair. Here's a list of all the stories included in Poe's Children:

The Bees Dan Chaon
Cleopatra Brimstone Elizabeth Hand
The Man on the Ceiling Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
The Great God Pan M. John Harrison
The Voice of the Beach Ramsey Campbell
Body Brian Evenson
Louise's Ghost Kelly Link
The Sadness of Detail Jonathan Caroll
Leda M. Rickert
In Praise of Folly Thomas Tessier
Plot Twist David J. Schow
The Two Sams Glen Hirshberg
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story Thomas Ligotti
Unearthed Benjamin Percy
Gardner of Heart Bradford Morrow
Little Red's Tango Peter Straub
The Ballad of the Flixible Bullet Stephen King
20th Century Ghost Joe Hill
The Green Glass Sea Ellen Klages
The Kiss Tia V. Travis
Black Dust Graham Joyce
October in the Chair Neil Gaiman
Missolonghi 1824 John Crowley
Insect Dreams Rosilind Palermo Stevenson

Also included at the end is a brief biography of each of the authors.

I suspect that like many readers, I have just a wee bit of difficulty reading when the story/author changes. Authors write with their own cadence. It always takes me a page or two to get in step, but other than that, I look forward to new anthologies, especially in the horror genre.

The best story in the collection, in my opinion only has to be October in the Chair by Gaiman, followed closely by Cleopatra's Brimstone. Picking these over the others is really pretty arbitrary since all of the stories are grabbers.

All things considered, Poe's Children is a unique collection by a diverse group of authors.
I highly recommend.

A quality anthology of horror short stories
Peter Straub selects 24 short stories that represent "the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades." The crossover between works usually classified as fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres and those considered to be literary, he asserts, "erases boundaries and blurs distinctions."

Two of the better tales are Stephen King's "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" (1984)--a story about the genesis of insanity, featuring a writer who suffers from the paranoid delusion that an imp inhabits his typewriter--and Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone" (2001), a story about an entomologist who is sexually assaulted and wreaks her revenge on men by "collecting" them in bizarre fashion.

King and Hand, plus 22 other New Wave horror writers, exhibit telltale affinities with the spooky imagination of Edgar A. Poe.

If you are a fan of horror stories written by inventive wordsmiths, this quality work is just your cup of tea!

About the author: Peter Straub is the author of 17 novels, including Ghost Story and Koko, as well as two collaborations with Stephen King. Winner of eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, two world Fantasy Awards, and both a Lifetime Achievement Award and election as a Grand Master from the Horror Writers Association. He lives in New York City.

An excellent anthology
What do you think of when someone mentions the Horror genre - vampires and zombies? Homicidal monsters shredding people's throats? Well, there is so much more to Horror than that. This interesting book brings together Horror short stories written by twenty-four different authors, each written in their own individual style.

Now, there are way too many stories in this book to give a synopsis all of them, and they are all so different. I really like The Bees, which I found to be the most horrifying of them all - so ripe with horror and regret. And The Two Sams was absolutely heart breaking.

Yeah, this is an excellent anthology. And, do you know what's the best thing about reading anthologies like this one? It allows you to discover wonderful authors that you have never read before. I really enjoyed this book, and don't hesitate to recommend it.