Book of the Week

This book has been out for over three decades yet I have yet to encounter a more recent anthology that is so full of scary stories. Not only does Dark Forces showcase a lot of great writers of horror stories -- for example, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch and of course, Stephen King -- but it also shows many of them at their very best.

The original idea behind this book was to create a dark fantasy equivalent of the classic science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions -- a book that had revolutionized the science fiction genre back in the 1960s. I can't say for sure how well it met that goal as far as the average horror story reader is concerned but I do know that I liked it very much the first time I read it. Moreover, while I have read many anthologies that had the potential to top it -- especially books that were part of Stephen Jones' Best New Horror series -- I have yet to encounter a book in the dark fantasy field that really tops it.

Of course, someone could release a book tomorrow that could prove me wrong. But until then...