Tuesday, October 27, 2020

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27 - Book




From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea edited by Mike Ashley. British Library. 2018.


In the fifteen short stories contained in this volume we are given a range of types of weird sea story. The stories represent the ghost story, Flying Dutchman story, Marie Celeste story, desert island tale, revenge from beyond the grave story, sea monster tale, Sargasso sea tale, strange submarine story, and others. The quality across these stories is generally high with no clunkers in the batch. Most, if not all,  of the stories, including the one by William Hope Hodgson, will be unfamiliar to most readers.  The final story, "No Ships Pass" by Lady Eleanor Smith, concerning a group of disparate castaways trapped together on an island that seems to change position around the globe, is probably the best of the lot.

I recommend this book and the other titles being published by the British Library in their "Tales of the Weird" line.



1 comment:

Cerpts said...

Wow, talk about on the same wavelength. I bought this book and 2 others from this series but haven't been able to read them yet.