Finished 5 in April.

1. The Dunwich Horror by HPL. Love these oversized art editions by Francois Baranger. Hope he keeps going with the Lovecraft catalog. 5 / 5

2. Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird ed. by Jonathan Maberry was a combination of classic fiction previously published in the magazine, unpublished new fiction, and nonfiction essays about weird fiction. Overall I thought this was a pretty good anthology, though, as with most large anthologies (480 pages) there was some bloat. IMO, the last 4 or 5 stories could have been left out without missing a thing.
My favorite story (of those I hadn’t previously read) was ‘Up From Slavery, by Victor LaValle, in which he mined similar Lovecraftian themes that he also explored in ‘The Ballad of Black Tom’, though I thought UFS was an even better story. 3.5 / 5

3. The Store by Bentley Little was a book I first read about 20 years ago. I thought it was an OK read back then, but had a much greater appreciation for it the second time around. It is a really effective horror story, with some genuinely creepy moments throughout, that were slightly brought down by a weak ending. 4.5 / 5

4. Elsewhere by Dean Koontz. A single father with a (very) plucky 11 year old daughter whose wife / mother walked out on them 7 years ago comes in possession of a device that allows travel between parallel earths goes in search of a new version of the missing wife / mother. Of course there are villains that want to get the device. Everything wraps up clean and neat in a typical Koontz story. 2.5 / 5

5. John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman. I’d read a few of the John stories before in various anthologies over the years (Dark Forces and Dark Descent come to mind). The stories basically revolve around John, a war veteran and ultimate good person, who walks the Appalachian mountain trails and combats evil with folk songs and a silver string guitar (and occasionally his fists). It’s a simple premise that probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. The stories in this edition were printed in order of publication date, which lead to some repetitious reading due to the similarities in some of the earlier stories. As John (as a character) and Wellman (as a writer) got older, the stories become more varied and, IMO, more interesting. 3 / 5

B