A TRYING TOME x FAMILIAR FICTION x WEAVER OF TALES
VENDETTA Zittaw Press
Time hasn’t been particularly attentive to Marie
Corelli. The British author’s name seldom appears amongst the ranks of better-known gothic scribes such as Poe, Bronte and Stoker. Yet, at her height in the late 1800s, Corelli’s popularity was massive. Her novels commanded a fan frenzy on par with that of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series today – sales were in the 100,000s and influential figures such as the Queen of England were part of her dedicated throngs. Yet the critics blasted Corelli, deriding her work as pulp for the masses, and over time the masses moved past her decadence, blubbering sentimentality and affected melodrama. Now, much like her sophomoric novel’s protago-
nist who comes back from the dead, so to speak, 1886’s Vendetta (a.k.a. Vendetta!; or, The Story of One Forgotten – jeesh!) has been unearthed and reprinted. But perhaps it should have remained buried. The tale of revenge and obsession, set in late 19th-
century Naples, begins with narrator Fabio Romani’s macabre ordeal: a victim of the cholera epidemic, he is prematurely announced dead. After awakening in the pitch black of his family’s tomb, he frees himself from his grotesque and fetid surroundings, and con- veniently discovers a mass of pirate’s treasure. Dis- figured, he returns home to his wife and best friend, only to learn of their ambivalence to his demise, and their illicit affair. Much like Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte
Cristo, Vendetta features a slow-building plot of treachery and revenge, with Romani assuming a new identity and returning to his haughty social circles to punish and humiliate. However, unlike The Count, Corelli’s work is unsophisticated and unremarkable.
Granted, she writes with a heavy Decadent gothic hand and the book’s narrator pours forth emotion with clobbering intensity, but there’s little in the way of ten- sion and plot twists to divert Vendetta away from complete predictability. Also, unlike her gothic contemporaries, Corelli
seems incapable of subtle characterization; Fabio is a scorned lover, a man obsessed and a colossal bore who can’t even hatch a creative murder plot. As such, the novel’s great crescendo is an unsatisfying anti- climax, and the bloody resolve the novel boldly fore- shadows is left unfulfilled. Still, it’s easy to imagine how Corelli’s style caught the fancy of the Victorian public, with its gut-wrenching tumult. Yet for all the salacious sentiment Vendetta oozes, there’s little to distinguish it for modern readers.
EVAN DAVIES THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF THE
BEST OF BEST NEW HORROR: TWO DECADES OF DARK FICTION Robinson
“Best” and “new” are fairly relative terms, es-
pecially in the case of this book. For one thing, The Best of Best New Horror does not contain any new stories or novellas. What’s more, these are not even the twenty best stories from the Best New Horror series that editor Stephen Jones has been care- fully compiling for the last two decades. Instead, Jones has selected what he believes is the best story or novella from each of the twenty volumes of the annual anthology and positioned them in chronological order to create a snapshot of recent horror history. Each story features a new introduc- tion from Jones, making this collection something of a commemoration of the series itself.
For most of these tales, this is not a second
printing but rather the third or fourth; all have been previously anthologized in other collections or pub- lished in well-known magazines such as Weird Tales. Even casual readers of horror fiction will rec- ognize a great number of the authors included, if not the stories themselves. Among them: Clive Barker’s “Haeckel’s Tale” (which appeared in the inaugural Dark Delicacies anthology), Stephen King’s “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” (from Just After Sunset) and Neil Gaiman’s “Queen of Knives” (from Smoke and Mirrors). Even the less mainstream writers in the collection are still predominately award-winning and well-es- tablished in their own circles. Being organized by year, the subject matter and
style of horror varies from tale to tale. Some have no comparison, such as International Horror Guild Award-winner “Cleopatra Butterfly” by Elizabeth Hand, a coming-of-age novella about a woman who can turn a man into a butterfly by taking him to bed. More familiar horror subject matter (read: vampires) often comes in the form of satire, as in Kim Newman’s “The Other Side of Midnight,” which follows a vamp-detective hired by Orson Welles to investigate the man funding his Dracula film. There’s no doubt that each story has its justified
place in this book and all are unique and well- crafted. But one can’t help but wonder if this re- lease was really necessary. Unless you’re a fanatical horror-lit completist, buying it for Jones’ additional commentary, or are entirely new to the Best New Horror series, there is really no need to repurchase these old tales in a new package, no matter how priceless each may be. JESSA SOBCZUK
T H E N I N T H C I R C L E 79RM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100