In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new anthology of classic horror stories
Shortly after receiving my review copies of Darryl Jones’s informative and engaging history of the horror genre, Sleeping with the Lights On, the publishers, Oxford University Press, sent me another recent publication Darryl Jones has worked on for them: a wonderfully expansive and well-selected collection of horror stories from E. T. A. Hoffman to the modern age, Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson (Oxford World’s Classics)
, the erudite Darryl Jones is our guide, picking up just the right example on the end of his pen (to borrow from and adapt Chesterton’s description of Jekyll and Hyde author Robert Louis Stevenson) and weaving together the disparate periods of horror fiction in all its forms – not just literature but film and TV too – in order to give us not so much a brief history of the horror genre as the story of the genre’s themes, tropes, interests, and preoccupations.