Here I’d heard that The Dark Descent was the greatest horror anthology ever, and the first story didn’t have anything that I felt could even be construed as horror. I can’t begin to describe how unhappy I was with this story. There are some things that I think are supposed to be ghosts. The Reach, Stephen King: The tale of an old woman who’s lived on an island off the coast of New England her entire life. Here’s the stuff I managed to get through, with asterisks by my favorite tales: It made for a much more enjoyable reading experience. So I resolved to do the following: instead of just going straight through the book, I’d read stories that were either A) written by authors I knew of/liked, or B) mentioned as some of the “best installments” when people reviewed The Dark Descent. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.Īfter reading King’s story and then the first few pages of the next two stories, I started to wonder if I even like horror at all. It’s the amount of background detail that gets me-I just don’t need that much info.Īnd, of course, the first story of the book happened to be by Mr. I’ve read Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot, and from those books I’ve decided I don’t much care for King. I went through the introduction and found that the guy who threw this anthology together had a massive boner for Stephen King. I started out by reading from the beginning (as is the tradition with books, I hear). But I feel I’ve read everything I’m going to from this book (at least, for the time being), so we’ll call it “Read.” I technically should put this book on my “Abandoned” or “Hiatus” shelf, because I didn’t finish it. ChambersĪ Little Something for Us Tempunauts / Philip K.

How Love Came to Professor Guildea / Robert Hichens

The Yellow Wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Within the Walls of Tyre / Michael Bishop The Fall of the House of Usher / Edgar Allan Poe Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper / Robert Bloch Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne The Whimper of Whipped Dogs / Harlan Ellison There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding / Russell Kirk Adopted by colleges across the country to be used in literature courses, The Dark Descent showcases some of the finest horror fiction ever written. This highly acclaimed anthology traces the evolution of horror, from Nathaniel Hawthorn and Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King.

The dark descent hartwell