cover image Ghosts and Robbers

Ghosts and Robbers

Edited by Daniel Corrick. Snuggly, $19 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1-64525-087-6

Corrick (Drowning in Beauty, ed.) pulls from obscure 19th-century German horror zines to create an anthology of gothic fiction that disappoints more than it excites. The majority of these 13 stories successfully deliver the trappings of gothic horror and romance—but trappings without substance make for lifeless tales. “The Bottle Imp” by Baron Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué gets off to a promising start as a young German is sold a devil in a phial by a miserable Spaniard. As it goes on, however, the story becomes an incoherent, garbled mess, overloaded with both useless plot turns and repetitive incidents. Louise Brachmann’s “The Proscribed Knight,” in which a pair of friends encounter the apparitions of a bloody knight and a beautiful woman, loses its intrigue when it devolves into an expositional exchange with the ghostly woman. “The Harp” by Karl Theodor Körner, about a secretary whose young wife dies from a fever, offers a clever combination of ghosts and music but fails to establish an emotional connection between the characters. Given how limp these pieces are, it comes as no surprise that these stories have been lost to time. This is only for the most devoted scholars of early horror. (Dec.)