Bernard put together an eclectic mix of tales, featuring classic ghost stories, some retellings of spooky folk-tales, plus a sprinking of new tales penned by modern authors. And so in 1967, a little anthology of spooky tales for younger readers, entitled The Armada Ghost Book first appeared on the shelves. Therefore when the idea of a junior equivalent was mooted, Christine Bernard once again took the reins. In 1966 Fontana launched a companion series to their Great Ghost Stories line, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, which was edited by Christine Bernard, who would produce another three volumes in that range. Armada had been acquired by Collins in 1996, who also owned Fontana. Now Robert Arthur had ghost-edited a couple of anthologies for kids as Alfred Hitchock (and that's a story for another day), however the real kids answer to the Pans and Fontana came from Armada Books. And with such a boom on weird fiction collections, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to do a range for children. By the 1970s, several more publishers were producing their own ranges of horror or ghost story collections, while editors such as Peter Haining, Michael Parry and Hugh Lamb were producing carefully curated themed anthologies. This collection of classic ghost stories went down so well, Asquith edited several more anthologies in the same vein such as When Churchyards Yawn (1931) and My Grimmest Nightmare (1935), and indeed would produce additonal volumes of The Ghost Book in the 1950s, establishing it as a paperback series.Īs you would expect, other publishers soon noted the popularity of the Asquith volumes and a similar series imported from America, the Not At Night range of anthologies.Therefore in 1959, the marvellously named Herbert van Thal put together The Pan Book of Horror Stories which was to spawn a massively successful range which would run for decades, while a few years later in 1964, rivals Fontana would hire legendary author of strange stories Robert Aickman to helm The Fontana Book of Great Stories. In the UK the great-grandfather of the horror anthology in modern times is probably The Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, a volume first published in 1927. However not that long ago original horror novels would have been outnumbered by a plethora of paperback antholgies.
These days, the Horror section in your local bookstore (if it has one) is likely to contain mostly novels, an after-effect of authors such as Stephen King and James Herbert hitting the bestseller lists in the 1980s. Weird fiction has always enjoyed a close relationship with the short story, and until relatively recently, lovers of the macabre would find the shelves of bookshops offering a wide range of anthologies to choose from.
0 kommentar(er)
