While I didn’t intend to post much here on this anthology, certain things rise up that provoke different trails of thought.
Obviously writing is relative in many ways to its era, i.e. Dorothy Parker’s ladies aren’t quite the same socialites these days. But if the writing is good, it brings one out of the present and into its own time and that often has something to do with the reason why some stories will become classics rather than merely "dated" and dead.
One wouldn’t have thought, however, that with the changes brought about through technology, that so many of the same things can bring us to shudder through the horror genre aside from spirits and natural pure evil. Just finished a story by John Collier called Evening Primrose, a journal in first person pov of a poet who decides to live in a department store, for:
Today I made my decision. I would turn my back for good and all upon the bourgeois world that hates a poet. I would leave, get out, break away– (p. 60)
Well that feeling is never going to change for the majority of those with creative bents. As a personal aside, this story immediately appealed to me because it brought back great memories of a childhood spent dragging around two floors of Wayside Furniture with my parents for hours, and deciding that I would live there someday. After all, the huge open warehouse ground floor was all set up with comfy sofa and chair settings that looked perfect for parties with a few hundred guests. And all around the walls of the loft-top floor were little perfectly furnished bedrooms where they could stay. Of course, I never did see a kitchen, but with that many guests, I suppose catering would be best…
Anyway, the twist between what would be expected in this story, that of being discovered there by the owners, customers, workers, is not the danger, but becomes one of a threat from the population who has moved in before the humble poet; they become active at night.
Yes indeed, this would still produce nightmares, regardless of time.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology