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13 April 2012

Forgotten Book: WINTERWOOD and Other Hauntings, Keith Roberts

For many of my contributions this year to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books  I am going to focus on the books I read 20 years ago in 1992. By then my reading diet was almost exclusively crime fiction.

But here, first read almost exactly 20 years ago, is a book that shows you that I dabbled elsewhere too. In this case, in tales of the supernatural, in line with my enjoyment of Edgar Allan Poe and others. 

Blurb from Fantastic Fiction

"Keith Roberts has long been one of my favorite SF writers, but I hadn't realized how much really top notch supernatural fiction he'd written as well.
This reprint of the 1989 British collection includes one of my favorites of his, "The Scarlet Lady," a demon car story that rivals Stephen King's Christine for its pure nastiness.
The title story is almost as good, chronicling the strange goings on in an old mansion, as is "Everything in the Garden," in which a woman is tormented by what appears to be a demonic tree.
The other stories include a variety of untraditional ghost stories, but there's nary a bad one in the bunch. There's never been a US edition of this before that I know of, so most of these stories should be brand new to most readers. One of the best titles Wildside has brought back into print." -- Don D'Ammassa, Science Fiction Chronicle

WINTERWOOD is available online at Google Books. It contains 7 longish short stories. Keith Roberts (1935-2000) published 13 novels and 8 short story collections, as well as contributing stories to a number of anthologies.

Read a review of WINTERWOOD on Darkling Tales
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous13 April 2012 at 08:24

    Kerrie - This does sound rather Poe-ian. Thanks for sharing it. I don't usually go much for the supernatural but sometimes there's a real gem among 'em.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Todd Mason14 April 2012 at 07:13

    Oh, there are quite a few gems among horror fiction, and not a few crime-fiction geniuses are also horror-fiction geniuses for fairly obvious reasons, I think, not even beginning with Poe.

    Keith Roberts was a woefully underappreciated writer, and the collection ANITA is also very much worth your attention...as is the linked-story collection PAVANE...

    ReplyDelete

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