Books I Read in January 2024

 Ghost stories, vintage science fiction, and some cosmic horror this month.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Wordsworth Editions, 2009)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was my first time reading anything by Edith Wharton and I was blown away. Beautiful prose and deeper themes than I was expecting from ghost stories.

Agent of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson (Ace Books, 1980)

This consists of three short stories and a novella from the 1950s about Captain Flandry of the Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps. It's labeled Book 3, but it collects the earliest written stories. There’s also an essay by Sandra Miesel that gives an overview of the character. Flandry is a suave rogue who works to stop the collapse of the Terran Empire, what he refers to as “The Long Night.” He’s a little like James Bond (Flandry came first though) who eventually travels with the alien Chives, a character who very much reminds me of Jeeves from the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P. G. Wodehouse. You can really see Anderson’s growth as a writer in these stories. 

Swordsmen from the Stars by Poul Anderson (DMR Books, 2020)

This collects three sword & planet pulp stories that originally appeared in Planet Stories in 1951. I enjoyed the first one, thought the second was pretty generic, and loved the third one. More detailed review to come. 

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (Penguin Classics, 2011)

I read this a few years ago and re-read some of the stories this month for Cosmic Horror January. Lovecraft is hit and miss for me but when he’s good he’s really good. This time I read from an edition that includes annotations from Lovecraft authority S. T. Joshi. I didn’t read every note but those that I did were fascinating and added to my enjoyment of the stories. 

The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales by H. P. Lovecraft (Sterling Publishing, 2015)

I also read parts of this for Cosmic Horror January. I had read about half the stories before and read the rest this month. This is a beautiful hardbound edition with an introduction by S. T. Joshi. 

Future Reading 

Now that I’ve read all of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories, I’ll be reading some Mythos stories by other authors including Robert Bloch, Neil Gaiman, and Caitlín Kiernan. 

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

This collection from Wordsworth Editions includes fifteen stories by Edith Wharton. The themes were deeper than I expected, and I thought that the prose in most of the stories was absolutely beautiful. 

Edith Wharton is best known for her fiction about upper class society during the Gilded Age and for winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. While her work includes social satire and comedy she also wrote about the conflict between individual desires versus society’s expectations, conflict in marriage, stifled passion, greed, and loneliness. Those themes also show up in her ghost stories. 

Some of these stories have ambiguous endings. I didn’t like this at first. After reading “The Maid’s Bell,” I was left wondering what had just happened. After reading an essay on the story I learned that some things had gone over my head and my appreciation of the story grew, especially regarding the ambiguousness of the ending. The essay doesn’t provide an explanation for what happens but instead gives possibilities based on the time period and based on what Wharton says and does not say. I agree with this David Stuart Davies quote from his introduction, which I read after finishing all the stories, “The challenging open-ended climax forces the reader to contemplate the story with more thought and decide for themselves.” Sure enough, the stories with ambiguous endings had me thinking about them long after finishing them. 

While it’s titled a collection of ghost stories, two of the stories, “A Journey” and “A Bottle of Perrier” are tales of suspense. New York Review of Books also has an edition of Wharton’s ghost stories titled Ghosts. I decided on the Wordsworth edition instead as it has four more stories than the NYRB edition and it was cheaper. I enjoyed this collection a lot and I’ll be seeking out her other work. 

Some of Wharton’s stories were adapted for the 1983 Granada television series Shades of Darkness. Three of her most popular stories were adapted, “The Lady Maid’s Bell,” “Afterward,” and “Bewitched.” As of this writing they’re available on YouTube in the U.S. 

My ratings:

The Lady Maid’s Bell (5/5)

The Eyes (4/5)

Afterward (5/5)

Kerful (5/5)

The Triumph of Night (2.5/5)

The Duchess at Prayer (5/5)

Miss Mary Pask (5/5)

Bewitched (5/5)

The Fullness of Life (4/5)

Mr. Jones (5/5)

Pomegranate Seed (3/5)

The Looking Glass (3/5)

A Journey (5/5)

All Souls’ (4/5)

A Bottle of Perrier (4/5)

Cosmic Horror January

This month I’m reading some Cthulhu Mythos stories and watching movies inspired by H.P. Lovecraft for an event I discovered on Twitter called #CosmicHorrorJanuary. It’s a good way to get around to reading some of the Lovecraft books I’ve collected over the years. 

The first horror book I ever read was The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror by H.P. Lovecraft from Scholastic Books. Next, I bought a number of Del Rey Lovecraft paperbacks with covers by Michael Whelan. Although I was more of a science fiction & fantasy fan in my school days I was also briefly interested in horror and weird tales. I remember liking "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Color Out of Space" but having a hard time with Lovecraft’s writing style. I didn’t seek out any other authors and my interest in horror fell by the wayside. That would change many years later when I got into horror movies. Eventually I rediscovered Lovecraft. 

I had a different experience when I read At the Mountain of Madness and the collection The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales when I was older. I still found Lovecraft wordy at times, but I really enjoyed the stories and the concepts, and I became a fan. 

For Cosmic Horror January I’ll be working through Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories as well as reading some Mythos stories by other authors from various collections. I’ll post my thoughts throughout the month. 

I just realized that I'm posting this on the fifth anniversary of my blog. My first post was on January 6th, 2019. Time flies.