The Big Book of the Masters of Horror: 120+ authors and 1000+ stories Kindle Edition

There are some absolute gems in this massive collection. These alone were worth reading through this huge tome to find. Because, many of the stories are dull and predictable. However, it gives a perspective of the way people constructed narratives in these times. One thing I hated was the tendency to abruptly end what was otherwise a good tale with trite farewell. Maybe that was the style in those days, but I didn't like it.

In general I am satisfied with the selections, which vary in quality from excellent to unbearably dull. You will find it easy to skip what you find unbearable, and you can hardly complain after paying less than $2 for the Kindle edition. I am writing a review only to point out an oddity and to ask if anyone else has noticed it.In the story "The Thing in the Forest" by Bernard Capes, a peasant woman had pity on a werewolf and threw it a bit of meat one night. Later, convinced she had sinned, she entered a church to confess and noticed a statue of the Blessed Virgin. The story continues with this odd paragraph (location 50728 of 273857):"'Mother, forgive, and save me,' she whispered, as she passed the statue. Now for a break from the story. Where do you think that this came from? Another site, that's where. Sorry if you find this annoying, but you might want to find a site that does the work instead of stealing someone else's work."I can only guess how this got into the collection and past the eyes of the editors, if there were editors.

Well, this is very uneven--some of the stories are gripping and well written; some are trite and not worth reading. I am about half way through; and I have just about had an overload stories of the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, but--all-in-all, this was worth uploading to my Kindle, just to fill some time.

Incredibly pleased with this book. Despite literally hundreds and hundreds of stories there were still many I had not come across before, and the dull or overlong ones were quite rare. The ones I had already read were of a high enough quality to merit re-reading. Overall impossible to go wrong if you are a fan of late Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories.A warning is in order though. These are not all ghost or horror stories. In several cases other types of stories by an author who worked in the scary genre are included. I found these enjoyable and in a collection of this size not disappointing the way it might be to find them in an anthology of 10-20 ghost stories.It is really impossible to go wrong with this book. It’s very size and scope eliminates the possibility of a sequel though I wish there could be one.

Although so many of these stories have been anthologised elsewhere, many more haven't and that's where the fun starts. Great value and tons of good reads in a book that you can pick up and put down at your leisure. Well worth it.

Great, huge, expansive collection. Can't beat the price. Many authors and works. I was surprised to not see Shirley Jackson.

This book is an incredible find for someone who enjoys reading this genre . Don't bother to purchase it if you don't have a decent vocabulary or even less-than-fifth-grade reading skills, because the stories were written by people who mastered the English language. If you are looking for gratuitous blood and gore look elsewhere, for you shall not find it here . Those who enjoy these stories are those who enjoy well-written and timeless literature.

Mostly English murder mysteries, broad selection, should have something for everybody.

I can only add to the previous reviewer of this volume (Librarian) who has given this book a five star rating. The book is phenomenal. It seems to cover nearly all the ghost and supernatural writers of the past, whose work has since entered the public domain. It is also formatted very well for a big book. In the past I’ve purchased similar type books, only to find them poorly formatted―no proper TOC with hyperlinks and difficult to navigate. This book isn’t bad at all, for it is fairly easy to get to a specific author and, once there, by clicking on their name, you come to a hyper-linked list of their short stories included in the volume; it seems to all work very well, and I’m certainly glad it’s not one of those books that has huge spaces between each of the paragraphs; these are all indented and tidy. And as there is no sample copy available (at least at this particularly point in time there isn’t) I had to gamble whether it was worth buying or not, and so far I’m very pleased, thanks mostly to the highly positive review I read on Amazon. Huge books like this will no doubt have their critics, for they cannot include all such authors of the past, and one or two will have probably been missed out. But so far, I haven’t noticed any. The book seems very thorough in its coverage and I would highly recommend it to other ghost story lovers.I hope you find my review helpful.

I enjoy reading out of print stories in the horror/supernatural genre. The positives are the number of eminent and obscure authors and their work included in this weighty kindle volume. So don’t get me wrong, the book is worth buying if you enjoy that kind of reading. The author introductions are concise and helpful and I have often researched unfamiliar authors for other works of theirs. So why the three stars. Well my rating is given purely on the presentation of the text. This leaves much to be desired. Many of these works have been lifted from other public domain sources, notably Project Gutenberg. I have noticed that the same errors and typos in this omnibus are the same as those on the public domain sites (believe me, I took the time to extensively check this). Now I have no problem with paying for compilations taken from free sources as the price is not onerous and someone should be paid for arranging the works into a presentable format. My problem is also not with the occasional missed typo or scan error, and I believe that most of these errors arise from scans. But it should not be much to ask that the compilers to at least read through the stories they are reproducing in order to remove the most glaring errors. To put it simply, there are literally thousands of typographical errors that could easily have been corrected, and some of these even a humble spell checker would flag up because some of the words contain non alphanumeric characters! So please, I don’t expect perfection. But it would be courteous to the humble reader to be seen to have made at least a cursory effort. Any errors I find I am flagging for the benefit of the seller but in the hope that these will at the least be rectified. So three stars, rather than five. But to be fair the book is still eminently readable, and this volume is just one of many that I have bought that required a proofreader. So my review is aimed at the publishers in the hope that they will seek to be more conscious of this issue in future offerings.

Seriously, the product description on Amazon doesn't do this volume justice. Yes it tells you that it contains works by E.F. Benson, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood & so on. What it doesn't tell you is quite how many stories there are by the writers included.There are 25 stories by E.F. Benson; 21 stories by Ambrose Bierce, 24 stories by Algernon Blackwood and the complete ghost stories of M.R. James. There are also more obscure writers whose works are seldom available online, such as Eleanor Scott, Clark Ashton Smith and H. Russell Wakefield.You could spend years reading this ebook and still not exhaust it. Get it now while it's available.

This is a magnificent collection of many, many stories, but be warned: it is very much of its time. So there are many instances of racism and sexism. The "n" word is liberally used, and in one story a man abducts a 12-year old girl he's fallen in love with. If you're offended by that kind of thing, don't read period fiction. If you're not, revel in this and marvel at its amazing vaue for money.

If you like 'weird' fiction, ghost stories and horror stories from the 19th and early 20th century, you should definitely get this. It is a huge collection and there are many stories that are hard to find elsewhere. Some authors get more comprehensive treatment than others - Poe, for example, gets only one story - but for the price, you can't complain. There are a number of irritating typos, which is why this anthology doesn't get five stars.