CC Spin: Stories of Walter de la Mare

By -
Short Stories, vol. 1, by Walter de la Mare

When will I learn not to read giant collections of short stories all at once?  I regret it every time.

Walter de la Mare sure wrote a whole lot of short stories.  They were for an adult audience and published in magazines at the turn of the century, when there was an endless demand for them.  Volume I covers 1895 - 1926, so a good bit more than just the turn of the century. 

These stories are mostly somewhat spooky.  They're not outright scary or horror; they're gently unsettling, or creepy, or disturbing, but they're not usually obvious about it. 

Some of them are rather thematic.  There were four or five stories in a row featuring characters inspecting gravestones for interesting, amusing, or pathetic epitaphs, which I sincerely hope were real epitaphs de la Mare had collected himself.

One story, one of the more obviously spooky ones called "The Riddle," had a detail that I believe may well have made its way into John Bellairs' The Mansion in the Mist.   

But, the trouble is that when I try to read an entire collection of short stories, I very soon get pretty tired of whatever the short stories are.  This is nearly 500 pages' worth of de la Mare being gently unsettling, and I just didn't want that much all at once.  So while I didn't finish the collection, I did get a good dose of de la Mare, and I believe I could spot one of his stories at 100 paces.  I'm going to call it good.

So that was a fairly successful Spin, I think.  I hope another one shows up soon -- and meanwhile, tomorrow is the start of 20 Books of Summer!

Comments

  1. Karen K.May 31, 2019 at 6:32 AM

    I love short stories but never seem to make time to read them. And I find them difficult to blog about -- do you write about individual stories? As a whole? And I agree, it's hard to read a lot of them at once. I hadn't heard of de la Mare but I am intrigued, especially the reference to John Bellairs who was one of my favorite writers as a child, I loved The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Delightfully creepy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanMay 31, 2019 at 6:35 AM

    Karen, I should have said who de la Mare was! He was an English writer and did a lot of stories and poetry for children, including collections of poetry in general. That's what he's most known for today.

    ReplyDelete
  3. KayMay 31, 2019 at 9:47 AM

    Good job reading so many! I'm trying to think what I know La Mare from. I think maybe children's poetry.

    ReplyDelete
  4. BronaJune 1, 2019 at 9:53 PM

    I know what you mean about short story collections. I've been reading a collection of Guy du Maupassant's stories for Paris in July for 3 yrs now. I read 3-5 each year and will hopefully finish the book this year.
    I once tried to read William Trevor's complete short story collection as a regular book, by about the twentieth story I was feeling numb!! Took me years to pick it up again.

    Congrats on completing your (our) 20th ccspin :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. JeanJune 1, 2019 at 10:29 PM

    That's what I should do, Brona! And congrats to you too ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Joy Weese MollJune 5, 2019 at 9:22 AM

    Good effort! They were originally published in ways that were meant to be read once a month or week or so. Perhaps that's how they work best.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Beth June 7, 2019 at 3:06 PM

    There are a few short story collections that I have read all at once, but they were all fairly short. Definitely not 500 pages!

    I have not done a CC Spin yet since joining the club last year. Maybe I will do the next one.

    ReplyDelete
  8. JeanJune 12, 2019 at 5:32 PM

    I hope so, Beth! Spins are my favorite. :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more