In praise of FALL RIVER PRESS.

Greetings, fellow worms!

Too often we bibliophiles get so caught up in the content of our tomes that we forget the publishing houses and editors that make our reading pleasure possible.   Now, I am a firm believer that the tale is all that matters (hence the URL for this blog), but we readers take for granted that somebody, somewhere, will do all the legwork for us to find this or that great story and put it into print.  We have become sickeningly accustomed to the ease of just walking into a bookstore, casually roaming the aisles with an overpriced cup of coffee in our hand, knowing that with just a minimal browsing effort we will more than likely find something to pique our interest.

That being said, I thought it a good idea to take a break from the usual posted reviews to write a quick note about Fall River Press.

In my hamlet of Tyler, TX, the selection of bookstores is not too shabby (especially for the size of the town).  Of used book stores, which I love, we have three.  Two are worth checking out, Fireside Books and Pea Picker.  The other one, which shall remain nameless, seems to have a very narrow view of public reading tastes and they also don’t seem to understand that used books should be priced as such.

Of retail chains, we have a Barnes & Noble store as well as a Hastings (which has a curiously well run book department considering it’s imprisoned within the shell of a dying model – the video rental store).

The Barnes & Noble store, for several different reasons, has become my usual haunt.  It’s got a great little Starbucks coffee café nestled inside, the inventory is first rate and the store personnel are top notch.  The best thing, though, is the place just has that great book lover’s vibe.

 

A few years ago, during one of their big clearance sales, the store had stacks and stacks of overstocked titles that were bargain priced and I picked up an anthology called The End of The World.  It proved to be a wonderful collection of classic SF tales (all centering around some form of the apocalypse as seen through the eyes of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries).  The tales ranged from the well known, like Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness” penned during the same lakeside vacation on which his friend Mary Shelley wrote her little bestseller, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger story, “The Poison Belt.”  There were, however, many great little tales in between, like Grant Allen’s “The Thames Valley Catastrophe” and Robert Cromie’s “The Crack of Doom” that I had either never heard of or had never run had before the good fortune to find in print.

The dust jacket for this little book and its title page showed that it was published by Fall River Press and edited (or compiled, as you like) by one Michael Kelahan. A little research has shown that Fall River Press is owned by another company that is actually wholly owned by Barnes & Noble.   Whatever its DNA, I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised and very satisfied by other anthologies put out by Fall River Press under Mr. Kelahan’s knowledgeable guidance.  The books tend to focus on tales from the classic era and early golden age of Horror, Ghost, SF and Weird, and are a great resource for those interested in rediscovering these great stories or just wanting to learn about the influences of more recent modern masters.

Below is a list of some of the titles they have put out in recent years, and each contains a great selection from whatever theme they cherry pick from a particular genre:

M is for Monster

The Body-Snatcher

The Screaming Skull

The End Of The World

The Monster-Maker

All of the above are edited by Michael Kelahan and all contain first rate content.  The first three mentioned concentrate on Weird tales while the last two revolve around a Science Fiction theme.  There are a few other titles not mentioned, edited by Stephen Jones and others, that are more a mixture of modern and classic authors which would seem great ways to sample Weird literature from its inception to the present day.  That’s my shout out to Fall River Press and Mr. Kelahan, just because I think they deserve it.

I urge all my fellow worms to check these titles out.  They are a great way to give you a wide ranging sample of classic genre tales and from a content standpoint will be an asset to your library.  If you are looking for monetary value, I wouldn’t bet on them becoming collector’s items as they are mass produced anthologies of mostly public domain material.  But there is just something about their content arrangement and choice of paper and font that just invites a reader in.  Enjoy and spread the word.