Book Review: Wolf's Complete Book of Terror

Book Review: 'Wolf's Complete Book of Terror' 

3 / 5 Stars

I remember getting this book sometime in the early 1980s, perhaps as a selection from the Quality Paperback Book Club (along with 'Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid').

 

Leonard Wolf (1923 - 2019) was Romanian-born emigre to the States who had a lengthy and successful career as an editor of anthologies, many of these devoted to horror and the 'Macabre.' He also wrote two nonfiction books on Dracula. His daughter Naomi Wolf is a well-known feminist and social critic.

 

'Wolf's Complete Book of Terror' (473 pp.) was published in June, 1979, by Clarkson Potter in both trade paperback and hardcover editions. It's illustrated with black-and-white reproductions taken from Old Tyme woodcuts, and low-res photo reproductions. 

Issued at a time when the Paperbacks from Hell boom was just starting to get traction, 'Wolf's Complete' benefitted from being a book club selection. I don't think many readers under 40 are going to understand how influential the book clubs were in terms of promotion and marketing, back in the 70s and 80s, when there was no amazon.............. 

 

Anyways, there are 63 entries in the anthology, consisting of excerpts from novels; short stories; and poems. In terms of chronology, they span from several centuries ago (the folk tale 'Bluebeard', from 1697) up until 1973, and LeGuin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.' The overwhelming majority of the entries are 'classical' in origin and selected, presumably, because they were in the public domain and thus less expensive in terms of acquiring the rights for reprinting in an anthology.

 

The book's highbrow approach to its selections is both its weakness and its strength. Some entries (such as 'Omelas,' 'Axolotl,' and 'The South') only are vaguely related to horror or the supernatural, and were included to pad things out. While there are a good number of classical ghost and horror tales ('The Fly,' 'It's a Good Life,' 'They Bite,' and 'The Monkey's Paw'), by the late 1970s these stories were starting to pall from being so regularly anthologized.

To the good, 'Wolf's Complete' did introduce me, when I was a college student, to writers such as Baudelaire (whose entry, the poem 'A Carrion,' is unlikely to be encountered in any other horror / supernatural anthology).

Summing up, those looking for a collection representative of classical horror tales and poems, culled from writers and cultures from around the world, will find 'Wolf's Complete Book of Terror' to be a good single-volume anthology. However, those wanting contemporary material, more firmly adhering to horror fiction tenets, will want to look elsewhere.