recent reads; Joseph Payne Brennan

Dover have reissued two hard-to-find horror collections by Joseph Payne Brennan. I'd been waiting to get a hold of THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT for a long time. Happy that NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM showed up, too.

These collections are a master class in writing short fiction. The stories contained in NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM are not flash fiction but with a few exceptions, they are short shorts. Brennan gets in, gets to the core of the tale, and gets out. The stories are lean and trim. The stories in THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT are slightly longer but still short overall.

Each volume is short. NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM is 106 pages. THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT is 124 pages.  (And they are printed in a decent sized font, too.)

My favorites were "The Willow Platform," "Canavan's Back Yard," and "The Mail for Juniper Hill."

If you are a horror or classic pulp horror fan, you owe it to yourself to add these to your collection and read them.

A few notes on these editions;

These are bare-boned editions. There are no introductions. Given that Stephen King wrote an introduction for the original THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT, and the fact that Brennan passed away in 1990, an introduction to the writer and his work would have been a value--especially for readers discovering him for the first time. (There is a Wikipedia page for Brennan, if you're curious.)

There is no information about the original appearances of the stories (where and when.) This might be the case with the original editions, I don't have them to compare. Not a deal breaker but I'm always curious about that.

Originally these collections appeared decades apart, so two stories overlapped. They have been cut from this edition of THE SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT but are included in NINE HORRORS AND A DREAM