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 19th and early 20th
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.