When I first read this I wanted to say something, then decided against it, then thought about it again, then told myself no way. But I'm still thinking about it and it seems to me any competently edited horror anthology could make the same point without hard to follow hallucinatory vignettes or genre hopping. As anyone who has ever been introduced to the school yard bully knows evil is manifest and its manifestations legion.
A couple of points: The edition Davies/Wordsworth put out was simply a reprint of the original collection, published in 1895; it was not a selection by Davies himself; hence it is exactly as Chambers himself intended it to be.
Also, collections of short stories didn't necessarily
have genre boundaries until relatively recently... unless both the author and publisher/editor agreed upon such. Thus John Buchan's
The Runagates' Club runs the gamut from suspense to slice-of-life to terror tales to comedy, depending on what his various narrators -- who are all resting at a sanatorium and telling each other tales of their experiences -- has to say. In this case -- and, in fact, in other of Chambers' collections, there is no intent to focus on horror or terror, but rather to relate an at best loosely connected set of tales; sometimes related by theme, sometimes by recurring characters, but almost never by "genre"... something which in itself was seldom considered until the rise of the pulp magazines and their tendency to specialize. Due to this, we get a selection of Chambers' work in different areas, which makes for (to me, at least) a rather interesting salmagundi. It won't, however, be to everyone's taste...
And...
The Maker of Moons is just such a collection. The first two tales have distinctly fantastic elements, though the endings of both may frustrate many readers as they indicate that each tale was told by the same author inventing a tale; a shattering of the illusion, as it were... and yet, it seems to me that this "shattering" is almost deliberately not quite successful, leaving the reader questioning whether it is the ending or the story itself which is the genuine article... the ending perhaps being a sort of "whistling past the graveyard"....* At any rate, following those two, the third story (which is also related by the same narrator, under a different name, and involves the same woman -- his wife Ysonde) is a different sort of thing altogether; a romance told with a mixture of tongue-in-cheek or ironic humor and pathos. The following stories are a mixed bag; all pleasant enough, but scarcely memorable... until the final two tales. "A Pleasant Evening" has something of that hallucinatory feel that some of the stories in
The King in Yellow have, and it may be seen as an odd sort of mystery/murder tale, or a ghost story, or... Whatever it is, I found it oddly compelling and haunting, though it, too, has a faint touch of the surreal such as one finds in "The Street of the Four Winds". I understand that the final tale, "The Man at the Next Table" is a ghost story, though it has been so many years since I last read the collection that I don't recall anything about it. I do know, however, that it has received some praise as being a very effective tale... and this is what I'll be tackling just before bed tonight.
I have also begun rereading Dudley Wright's
The Book of Vampires (a.k.a.
Vampires and Vampirism), which is a nonfiction look at the prevalence of the vampire legend throughout history around the world. Again, it has been a loooong time since I last read this, but it is told in an easy, flowing style which is both entertaining, informative, and at times quite atmospheric....
*Incidentally, there is a reference which makes these stories almost related to the earlier volume, as in the second tale two characters begin to recount a story to one of the others, beginning "There was once a King in Carcosa".... This certainly adds to the blurring of boundaries within the tale.....
And I'm not sure I'll get to the Bloch/Martin this month after all. Still possible, though, I suppose.
