Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is The Book of Wonder about?
Fourteen brief tales written, unusually, to accompany Sidney Sime's illustrations rather than the other way round: 'The Hoard of the Gibbelins', whose treasure-keepers eat the burglars; 'How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles', the definitive cautionary tale for ambitious thieves; 'Chu-bu and Sheemish', the pettiest divine rivalry in literature. Dunsany's irony is at its driest here, repeatedly setting up romantic quests and decapitating them with a final sentence. Fantasy rarely gets funnier, stranger or more elegantly cruel.
Why it matters
A masterclass in the short fantasy tale whose influence runs through Jack Vance, Le Guin and Gaiman; 'the edge of the world' became a permanent fantasy location here.
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