The Weird: A Compendium Of Strange And Dark Stories (edited by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer
It’s a huge, 1,100 pages, double-columned anthology. They very kindly have one of my stories in there, which isn’t the reason I’m recommending it. It has enormous range. As well as doing lots of British and American weird fiction, with a fair tendency towards supernatural horror, but they also range much more widely, to Africa and Japan and so forth. It’s a very compendious anthology, a tremendous introduction to the weird, however you want to define this. It includes several short stories that otherwise I’d be trying to include in the list that I’m now giving you. You’ve got Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, which is very possibly the greatest story of cosmic horror ever written. It is an absolute masterpiece, along with Lovecraft’s ‘Colour Out Of Space’, it’s very much on that level for me. It has Fritz Leiber’s ‘Smoke Ghost’, one of the crucial turning points in the urban supernatural horror story. Whereas previously, even in somebody like M.R. James, the everyday is invaded by the supernatural, in the Leiber story, the everyday is the source of the supernatural menace. This seems to me to be a radical turning point, which certainly influenced my stuff in a big way. There’s Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Crowd’. There are people that you may not have come across before, like Mark Samuels, a very fine British writer, there’s M John Harrison. There are many of the expected names, and many more of the unexpected names too. Kafka, Leonora Carrington, Joyce Carol Oates. It’s a wonderful book. When people ask if there is a single book of the weird that I can recommend, this has now become my first choice.