Short Story Wednesday: VAMPIRES, ZOMBIES, WEREWOLVES AND GHOSTS: 25 CLASSIC STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL edited by Barbara H. Solomon and Eileen Panetta (Signet Classics 2011)

Or, How Things Can Go Very Wrong for a reasonably good anthology. Consider the timing, for a book edited by two feminist literature professors, who dedicate this book to their daughters, with the contents of their hefty new anthology, a relative rarity in the Signet Classics line (which has always run to new introductions to novels and short story collections of some venerability) arranged in alphabetical order by last name of writer:

• xi • Introduction (Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves and Ghosts) • essay by Eileen Panetta and Barbara H. Solomon
• 1 • Count Dracula • (1971) • short story by Woody Allen
• 7 • The Room in the Tower • (1912) • short story by E. F. Benson
• 21 • The Man Upstairs • (1947) • short story by Ray Bradbury
• 35 • The Brood • (1980) • short story by Ramsey Campbell
• 49 • The Company of Wolves • (1977) • short story by Angela Carter
• 61 • The Lawyer and the Ghost • (1837) • short story by Charles Dickens
• 65 • Lot No. 249 • (1892) • novelette by Arthur Conan Doyle [as by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
• 99 • The Shadowy Third • (1916) • novelette by Ellen Glasgow
• 125 • The Third Option • (2007) • short story by Derek Gunn
• 135 • 20th Century Ghost • (2002) • short story by Joe Hill
• 155 • The Ghostly Rental • (1876) • novelette by Henry James
• 189 • Home Delivery • [Little Tall Island / In the Path of the Eclipse] • (1989) • novelette by Stephen King
• 217 • The Mark of the Beast • (1890) • short story by Rudyard Kipling
• 231 • The Girl with the Hungry Eyes • (1949) • short story by Fritz Leiber
• 247 • Cool Air • (1928) • short story by H. P. Lovecraft
• 257 • For the Good of All • (2009) • short story by Yvonne Navarro
• 267 • Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly • (1992) • novelette by Joyce Carol Oates
• 295 • Excerpt from Dying to Live • [Dying to Live; 2007] • short fiction by Kim Paffenroth
• 315 • The Master of Rampling Gate • (1984) • novelette by Anne Rice
• 333 • The Ghost • (1978) • short story by Anne Sexton
• 339 • Excerpt from Dracula • [Dracula Excerpts] • short fiction by Bram Stoker
• 353 • Excerpt from The Wolfen • short fiction by Whitley Strieber
• 365 • The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealistic Romance • (1997) • novelette by Oscar Wilde (variant of The Canterville Ghost 1887)
• 395 • Disturb Not My Slumbering Fair • (1978) • short story by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
• 409 • Green Messiah • (1988) • short story by Jane Yolen

It might well be the case that leading off with a Woody Allen story in the months before the big exposure of his (alleged, sadly probable) worst bad behavior began wasn't the only factor that led to this fat anthology, listing at $7.95 US ($8.99 Canadian) from a usually relatively low-priced line of paperbacks (one of its several charms), to see only one printing, so far, a dozen years out. But it probably didn't help. Which is a bit of pity, since it's an interesting selection of chestnuts and some relatively recent materials, with an enthusiastic introduction and headnotes, that its editors clearly hoped would become a (relatively) low-priced textbook in classrooms, mostly for college undergrads but also probably high schools as well. For various reasons, of course, H. P. Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and in some somewhat less voluble corners Anne Rice and Ann Sexton would all be problematic entries in cirricula in even that year and no less now as we start seeing all kinds of resentment of extraliterary (leaving aside some real questions of literary) deviance from the Good and True by these folks or whichever subset one chooses to dislike thus. I'm not the biggest fan of the works of Lovecraft, at least many of his I've read, nor Rice, Strieber, and a few others, and find most of Allen's prose (as with his scripts) pretty shallow, but this remains on balance a good anthology, if somewhat eccentric in its selections...and somewhat interesting in what the purview of the anthology as stated leaves out in horror fiction (other shape-shifters, obviously, but also any number of stories where the fantasticated danger to the characters is something less tangible or identifiable, more a question of realities as a whole shifting, etc.).

And, in fact, let's look at the Allen sketch in prose...the editors date it from 1968, without giving the provenance of that date (maybe Getting Even, the book that gave this its apparent first publication in 1971, includes Allen's tags as when each piece was written), and while it's a competent, not un-witty nor not un-clever but slight comedy item in prose, apparently The New Yorker didn't choose to buy this one, unlike most of the contents of the 1971 book, and they aren't Too wrong. (Of course, editor William Shawn might've, in his self-adoring way, have considered the concept of Dracula too crass.) Something like his later short story "The Kugelmass Episode" might be better for the purposes, except that it has none of the four cited monsters...

For more of today's choices, please see Patti Abbott's blog.