Friday's Forgotten Books

When Patti Abbott suggested that this week's Friday's Forgotten Books be story collections or anthologies, I thought great, I can do this one. Then I looked at my shelf of anthologies and thought, Oh my God, how do I choose just one?

Yeah, I've been collecting short stories for the past several years. Every time I go to the summer book sales I find at least one collection or anthology of shorts in various genres. There's "Great Stories of Suspense" edited by Ross Macdonald, "Crime Classics" edited by Rex Burns and Mary Rose Sullivan, and "Luke Short's Best of the West" collection. With so many, how do I choose just one?

So, I thought about the stories themselves, which ones stuck with me the most? And I chose "Alfred Hitchcock Presents:Slay Ride". One confession, I didn't read the novel included in the book which is "Out of the Deeps" by John Wyndham, but the shorts - I read them all. And you won't find a more chilling collection of shorts anywhere, in any genre.

"Slay Ride" was published in 1967 but most of the stories inside were first published in the Fifties with a couple of exceptions. What amazed me the most reading these stories was how the writers could terrify you without resorting to the blood and gore and obscenities that pepper short stories today. Each story takes you on an incredible "ride" that scares the bejesus out of you. And every story blurs the genre lines, slipping from horror to crime to sci-fi without missing a beat.

My two favorite stories in the collection are "Men Without Bones" by Gerald Kersh and "The Cage" by Ray Russell. The stories are as different as night and day but it was the endings of both that turned the stories on their heads. If you ever want to learn how to end your short stories with a shiver and a bang find these stories and just read.

Kersh's story had me believing I was reading the story of a man who was confessing to murder until I read that very last sentence which spun the story on its ear. And Russell's story of lust and betrayal ended with an image that I still can't shake from my head and I shiver every time I think about it, a year after first reading it.

Here's a list of the shorts:

Men Without Bones by Gerald Kersh
Not With a Bang by Damon Knight
Party Games by John Burke
X Marks the Pedwalk by Fritz Leiber
Two Spinsters by E. Phillips Oppenheim
The Cage by Ray Russell

If you can find them, read them, you won't be sorry. You may not be able to sleep after you do, but they're well worth the read.

Almost forgot! You can find the entire list of folks participating this week at Patti's blog http://pattinase.blogspot.com/ Loads of great books to start hunting for.