Book Review: The Weird
Posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 at 14:50
I recently bought
The Weird: A Compendium of strange and dark stories for my new Kindle for the princely sum of £12.78 from Amazon, and was so impressed I had to write a review to recommend it.
I love Weird stories, and this huge compendium is full of the strangest and weirdest tales I have ever read. Some I admit I have read before (I don’t believe that there is a H.P. Lovecraft short I have not read), but the world of the strange is so much greater than even I expected. Strange tales that were originally published far from English-speaking lands, horrible twisted thinking from masters long gone, unheard of, forgotten and overlooked, as well as the giants of the genre.
Basically if you like a disturbing read, if you like science fiction, horror or fantasy then you’ll find something in this enormous anthology for you. The breadth of genres scoured to find these tales of the strange is quite staggering and I take my hat off to the incredible editing job done by the VanderMeers in collating this impressive array of unusual fictions.
The only complaint I could make about this enormous digital tome is that there is a distinct lack of navigation built into the e-book. This kind of anthology means that there are dozens of short stories by various authors, and it would have been nice to be able to dash about this book with the ease of flicking through a real book, but the Table of Contents, if it exists, is buried I don’t know where in the Kindle edition. You can slide/swipe between stories on the Touch, but that is not quite the same as a good Contents menu, also I don’t know about you but I find the directions of those Touch gestures to be counter intuitive (up is on, down is back?!), but this one niggle aside — this is a great collection of stories.
If you really want a ‘real’ book of this anthology you can get that here for only £5 more.
All these links use my amazon affiliate ID, so if you buy them I get amazon gift vouchers… It’s a great program you should think about signing up yourself if you haven’t already…