Where Terror Stalked and Other Horror Stories by Charles Birkin

It is brief, brutal, and bereft of moralizing or sentiment. The most disquieting segment of the story is when the eponymous lunatic tromps through a field and imagines that the ripe stalks bursting under his feet are the heads of random strangers. This tale follows an asylum inmate released for mysterious reasons who goes on a killing rampage that begins in the pond-haunted countryside and ends in the dullness of a shopping center in the town. The violence in this anthology begins with fratricide in the Grimms’ “The Singing Bone” and and culminates in the absolutely horrific and bloody “The Lunatic” by the poet Georg Heym. Writers more unknown to English speaking audiences such as Klabund and Salomo Friedlander make appearances, while other inclusions come from unlikely sources such as Robert Walser and the poet Paul Celan (whose befuddling prose-poem “The Shadowlight” I found disappointing.)Įditor Peter Wortsman notes in the introduction the hard-edged quality to much of German fantasy, its preoccupation with the macabre and the violent. Oft anthologized classics such as Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and Adelbert von Chamisso’s “Peter Schlemiel” are included, but so are a large number of more obscure pieces. It is a survey of German fantastic fiction, running from early Märchen (the rougher German term for fairy tales) to the expressionism of Georg Heym and the Dadaism of Kurt Schwitters. I’ve just finished the Penguin anthology Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann. “Enough,” replied the dreamlike presence, “take your flowers cheerfully, as life offers them, and don’t dig for their roots in the ground, it’s sad and silent down below.” – Josef von Eichendorff, ‘The Marble Statue.’ Cover featuring Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s woodcut “Self Portrait: Melancholy of the Mountains.” (1929).

Where Terror Stalked and Other Horror Stories by Charles Birkin