Create your own short story collection!

[luciferfell]

The Name of the game is this, if a publisher came to you and wanted to publish a collection of your favorite short stories.. what would the table of contents be? I think 10-15 stories are advised as average collection length. Short novellas also can be included. My list...

The Metamorphosis- Kafka
The Forest- Barron
The Festival- Lovecraft
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream- Ellison
Sticks- Wagner
The Fall of the House of Usher- Poe
The Companion- Campbell
Orpheus at Mount Pangeum- Kiernan
The Trains- Aickman
Ghorla- Samuels
Bianca's Hands- Sturgeon
Bloodchild- Butler
The Jar- Bradbury
The Cocoons- Ligotti
Madame Edwarda- Bataille

Now this is just a first pass, Im sure I forgot some. But these stories stand out to me and have burrowed into my psyche. I love lists and I hope some people chip in on this thread!

[beetlebox]

A brilliant, but terrible dilemma.
Once I had got to number 10 in the list below I realised that I hadn't included anything by Poe, Thomas Owen, Quentin S.Crisp, Simon Strantzas, Robert Aickman to name but a few, it's a very addictive activity and I could just keep going and going....

My Case for Retributive Action – Thomas Ligotti
The Spider – Hanns Heinz Ewers
The Glance - Stefan Grabiński
Disappearing Act - Richard Matheson
The Boy in Green Velvet -Reggie Oliver
Mannequins in Aspects of Terror - Mark Samuels
The Corridor - Darko Macan
In the Penal Colon - Franz Kafka
A Slate Roof In The Rain - Jeremy Dyson
The Rats in the Walls - H.P. Lovecraft

By the way - I recommend "The Corridor by Darko Macan" which I read on the Weird Fiction Review website:
The Corridor | Darko Macan | Weird Fiction Review

[luciferfell]

Ewers and Grabinski really should be on my list.... Hm.. like I said its not meant to be definite. Mannequins in Aspects of Terror was almost my Samuels pick.

[ramonoski]

My dream anthology would be one of horror stories about music or musicians, but I'm afraid I'm nowhere as well read as I'd like to be able to put one together. I'd have stories by Lovecraft, James Wade and Thomas Ligotti, and perhaps I'd manage to sneak in Spencer Holst's "The Music Copyist", which isn't exactly horror but there's a fantastic element to it. There's two comic stories from the Hellraiser and Cthulhu Tales series that could be wonderful if converted to prose, and there's an anonymous creepypasta, "The Song and Dance Man", that could make the cut as well... and I'm afraid that's all I got, or can recall at the moment. Any ideas or suggestions on what else could be included will be most welcome.

But I digress. Back to the topic. If I had to put an anthology of my favourite stories... not an easy task, but I'll give it a go. In no particular order (and not particularly aiming for horror, but given my natural proclivities I presume it'll get the edge):

"An Abhorrence to All Flesh" by Matt Cardin
"In the Hills, the Cities" by Clive Barker
"Sob in the Silence" by Gene Wolfe
"A Hypothetical Lizard" by Alan Moore
"The Guest" by Amparo Dávila
"Big Day" by Thomas Wiloch
"Vrolyck" by Mark Samuels
"The Return" by S.D. Tullis
"We Can Get Them For You Wholesale" by Neil Gaiman
"Again" by Ramsey Campbell
"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges
"The Bungalow House" by some author whose name I forgot

[Druidic]

If I were ever to edit an anthology it would probably consist of my favorite Lovecraftian stories, the stories I consider to be genuinely Lovecraftian. We all laugh or groan at the ghastly pastiches of Lovecraft’s work by writers who would throw in a tentacled monster or two and then add a few hideous volumes of demonic lore in the hope of making a BAD story ‘Lovecraftian”. Ironically, that practice continues even today (with a little variation) where we have writers creating stories of existential despair and loss, stories that have nothing to do with the Old Gent, but passing them off as Lovecraftian by just introducing a blind, meaningless Cosmos. These stories may be better written than the old tentacles and props stories but the end result is the same: a story that misses the mark completely. Many of the stories I would chose could easily be mistaken for Lovecraft revisions…the good revisions. That was my only criteria: selecting stories that Lovecraft himself might have written.

Being a generous editor, I would probably include 20 stories, including Leiber's "The Black Gondolier" and Campbell's "Who Goes There?"

Hey, Ramonoski, you might want to check out “Harold’s Blues” for that music-themed anthology. I think you might enjoy it.

Far Below – Johnson
The Titan in the Crypt – Werner
Clay – Thompson
The Pale Criminal -- Thompson
The Will of Claude Ashur – Thompson
Spawn of the Green Abyss – Thompson
The Crib of Hell – Pendragon (Thompson?)
The Dunstable Horror – Pendragon (Thompson?)
The Graveyard Rats -- Kuttner
Harold’s Blues – Glen Singer
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis – Smith
The Autopsy – Shea
The Last Feast of Harlequin – Ligotti
Notebook Found in a Deserted House – Bloch
Fingers in the Sky -- Keller

[Robin Davies]

Ooh, this is fun! Assuming we're allowed novelettes my list (at this moment) would be:

The Breakthrough - Robert Aickman
The Voices of Time - J. G. Ballard
The Man Whom the Trees Loved - Algernon Blackwood
Skeleton - Ray Bradbury
Ynys-y-Plag - Quentin S. Crisp
A Last Look at the Sea - Jeremy Dyson
The Eldritch Faith - Richard Gavin
The Gift - M. John Harrison (My absolute favourite)
"Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" - M. R. James
Black Man with a Horn - T. E. D. Klein
Gonna Roll the Bones - Fritz Leiber
The Bungalow House - Thomas Ligotti
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - H. P. Lovecraft
A Fragment of Life - Arthur Machen
The Trustie Tree - Keith Roberts

[ramonoski]

I like that this thread works as both an exercise of sorts in creativity and a potential to-read list

[Waffiesnaq]

I'm away from my library tonight, so I have to participate in this wonderful thread without access to some volumes that would surely make me go "Oh, this NEEDS to be in the collection!" But if I can't recall those stories off the top of my head, then they probably have no business being labelled as my favorite ones in the first place.

Let's see...

The Last Smoker - Yasutaka Tsutsui
Eve's Diary - Mark Twain
The Festival - H. P. Lovecraft
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
The Town of Cats - Hagiwara Sakutarō
Berenice - Edgar Allan Poe
Shakespeare's Memory - Jorge Louis Borges
Equus Caballus - Eric Basso
The Night School - Thomas Ligotti
Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale - Thomas Bernhard

Ugh, ten has never been a more inadequate number.

[luciferfell]

Great responses, and all books I would buy! Yeah I didn't do research for my list either.. just off the top of my head.

[Nemonymous]

An anthology designed for TLO members (who will have already read and owned all Thomas Ligotti stories), featuring some favourite stories most of which I discovered while real-time reviewing.

The Hound - HP Lovecraft
Flowers of the Sea - Reggie Oliver
The Bellman - Colin Insole
Nights at the Regal - Jason Gould
Dying In The Arms of Jean Harlow - Paul Meloy
The Flying Worm - Simon
The Sleep Mask - Joel Lane
Cuntlock - Rhys Hughes
Cyprian's Room - Frances Oliver
People on the Island - T.M.Wright
A House by the Ocean - Steve Rasnic Tem
The Hareton K-12 County School and Adult Extension – James Van Pelt
Sleepers - Christopher Harman
Sado-ga-Shima - Quentin S Crisp
The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada - Anonymous

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE