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A review by pamwinkler
American Supernatural Tales by S.T. Joshi
2.0
I read this because I really liked the 'The Madness of Cthulhu" and enjoyed it. This was overall pretty mediocre. Some good stories, more that were just pretty ok. I think the thing that annoys the most is that it feels biased. S. T. Joshi had a pretty snarky comment about Steven King; "...the majority of King's writing is indeed marred by clumsy prose; hackneyed conceptions derived from film, comics and other media; and a rather dreary prolificity..." Yes, I'm sure the prolificity of his work is the problem here.
There's no comment about anything in King's work that is good, and then the Steven King story he includes is as supernatural as a brick. And not a story that I think is particularly well-written, either. I like Steven King a great deal. He has work that I don't think is very good and he has work that I just don't like very much. He can also do work that you'll read and reread, that will come up in the middle of the night as you try to sleep. I tend to like his more Lovecraftian works best, but he's got some absolutely marvelous stuff. This made me feel that S. T. Joshi is having issues with the 'popular=bad' cliche. He seems to like the 'stream of consciousness' stuff a lot more than I do. I have a hard time with that technique. I tend to try to skip it as 'crazy person ranting on the internet' and I have a hard time remembering to read it.
"The Hollow Man" by Norman Partridge and "In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)" by Caithlin R. Kiernan were good.
There's no comment about anything in King's work that is good, and then the Steven King story he includes is as supernatural as a brick. And not a story that I think is particularly well-written, either. I like Steven King a great deal. He has work that I don't think is very good and he has work that I just don't like very much. He can also do work that you'll read and reread, that will come up in the middle of the night as you try to sleep. I tend to like his more Lovecraftian works best, but he's got some absolutely marvelous stuff. This made me feel that S. T. Joshi is having issues with the 'popular=bad' cliche. He seems to like the 'stream of consciousness' stuff a lot more than I do. I have a hard time with that technique. I tend to try to skip it as 'crazy person ranting on the internet' and I have a hard time remembering to read it.
"The Hollow Man" by Norman Partridge and "In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)" by Caithlin R. Kiernan were good.