Reddit reviews The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

Ellen Datlow is phenomenal and has edited a ton of really great work. Another standout I think would be Jeff and Ann VanderMeer who edited the outstanding collection The Weird among other things. One of my personal favorites is Thomas F. Monteleone for editing the Borderlands series (I had the White Wolf editions), which contains so many masterfully bizarre and memorable stories and is probably my top collection/series of all time.

If you really want to delve deeper into this genre, I recommend getting your hands on Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. In my opinion there is no other single anthology that covers so much ground of this particular thread of speculative fiction while being up to date with current developments. It is the veritable weird fiction bible, within it you will find selected stories from all the essential writers as well as many more obscure ones. You couldn't find a better place to start if you wanted to see what is out there. I won't repeat any of the suggestions made here, but stories by most of the authors you see in this thread will be in this anthology.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer did a pair of anthologies, The New Weird and The Weird that are a good place, I think, to start.

The VanderMeer's book The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is a great place to start.

I would say the three you listed are definitely canonical, with Mieville and Vandermeer being considered part of the "New Weird" revival. I think really Jeff and Anne VanderMeer's anthology has most of what would be canonical, along with some more obscure stuff that is important but not widely known.

You can view the authors in that anthology here at this Amazon preview and it's well worth having on your book shelf.

There are certainly important writers who were omitted either by necessity or for other reasons, but it's a great starting point for such a discussion. I for one was surprised William Hope Hodgson, Ambrose Bierce, and Walter De La Mare were not included amongst the older authors in that anthology, and I was a little surprised also that it did not go a little further back, historically, with something like a Poe short story or an excerpt from Melmoth the Wanderer. I would think of Hodgson, Bierce, and de la Mare as canonical, but they were omitted. Oh well, it's impossible to do something like that perfectly.

For what it's worth, my favorite, and in my opinion, those that should be considered modern canon, of the newer weird authors are: K.J. Bishop, Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, and Michael Cisco, in addition to Mieville and Vandermeer. My favorite older ones are De La Mare, Franz Kafka (my favorite author of all time right here), and Jean Ray. I think Kelly Link probably has the most staying power of the more recent authors, while Bishop and Cisco are less recognizable even if they are important. I'd also throw in Ligotti as important to the field, though that's more based on impression and word of mouth than direct experience as I've only read one of his stories. People seem to love that elusive fellow.

Some authors from the middling period (I'd estimate 1940s-1970s) that I would say are most canonical are Daphne du Maurier, Charles Beaumont (wrote for Twilight Zone), Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury. I was also surprised that Matheson was not included in that anthology. I think that in a lot of cases, stories by those authors are well-known and have become important cultural markers, even if the author's names are sometimes forgotten. Almost everybody is familiar with Jackson's "The Lottery," even if they don't read weird lit. Almost everybody is familiar with one of du Maurier's stories, even if they don't know it (The Birds, Don't Look Now). I think that's an important marker of considering if something is important to a genre because it acts in a kind of ambassadorial fashion. Likewise with someone like Kafka: he wrote very weird stories, and he was so talented at it that a new word was coined to describe something with that particular weird quality that his stories had.

Most of the authors that Centipede Press chooses for its fancy editions should probably also be considered part of the canon, though they do also put out hard-boiled crime fiction and straight-up horror sometimes. S.T. Joshi, who is an important editor in the field, puts out his Library of Weird Fiction series through Centipede, so you can look through those authors as important staples which are in some cases not included in the anthology I linked above.

EDIT - Expanded a bit

HP Lovecraft is the most obvious literary destination. If you've never read him you're in luck, as there are two more or less complete collections of his work: if you're a stickler for accuracy try this one and if you want to get something beautiful but with some typos and errors you can order this exquisite leather-bound edition (even its marbled endpapers hide monsters).

In terms of more modern stuff, Jeff Vandermeer's Area X trilogy is some of the best Lovecraft-infused fiction I've read. Which is no surprise when you know that his wife is the current editor of Weird Tales, one of the first places to publish Lovecraft. Indeed, they've actually put out an anthology of Lovecraftian short stories by all sorts of writers, old and new, including Lovecraft.

In terms of movies, I hope at some point Guillermo del Toro will get to make his At the Mountains of Madness film, but the fact that he hasn't speaks to the difficulty of a) financing expensive R-Rated horror movies b) parsing Lovecraft's gloomy visions with hero-driven narrative. One of the few films to nail the tone, even if its execution leaves something to be desired, is Frank Darabont's The Mist.

I like my anthologies to contain multiple authors across multiple eras, and to provide an overview of the field from some particular perspective.

The classic anthology is Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural a massive 1000+ page stunner that is a great primer for the genre, focusing on earlier work.

Ellen Datlow's Darkness is a great anthology for the 80s - 2000s.

Joyce Carol Oates edited a fantastic history of American gothic fiction, called, not surprisingly American Gothic Tales starting with Washington Irving and ending with Stephen King.

And for a taste of horror from a more modern perspective (while including a lot of classic stories) The Weird is a really terrific overview.

I've been reading The Weird and Ligotti's The Town Manager has probably been my favorite short of the year. It convinced me to pick up Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and I haven't been disappointed.

Anyway, favorite for the year is The Town Manager. It is about an ineffective town manager who is replaced by someone more incompetent. Has a very Kafkaesque nightmarish world.

The Weird is likely the most comprehensive, though I'd also suggest Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.

Another voice for yes. I really enjoyed their compendium of strange and dark stories "The Weird"

I bought the collection this article was advertising. Thanks for raising my awareness! Looks awesome: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765333627/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

The Weird is one of my favorite collections of Weird stories. It's a behemoth, but well worth it imo.

...years ago I bought a huge compendium of weird horror fiction. That was the first time I read Daphne du Maurier's "Don't Look Now"
...then, I had a professor, who loves the Criterion Collection, tell me about the film when it released on CC. I had no idea there was a movie too. :) Now, I love it.

For horror, many of Poe's stories fit the bill. "The Mask of the Red Death" is one of his best, though I might also recommend "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Yale Heart". That last is an especially gripping tale of guilt driving a man insane. If you can find the reading by Basil Rathbone, listen to it. It's up on Spotify.

E. A. Poe's works are regularly collected and reprinted, as they've been in the public domain for decades. Here's a link to one nice looking release.

I'd suggest any of the collections of Lovecraft's books published by Ballantine/Del Ray for an introduction to Lovecraftian horror; a very specific subset of horror that I'm especially fond of. Amazon carries them. Here's a direct link to Lovecraft's dream cycle, stories he drew directly from his dreams. The book's title is "Dreams of Terror and Death", And it's also available on Audible.

The last collection I'm gonna suggest covers weird fiction in general (not just horror, but stories of all different genres that have a touch of "strangeness" or "otherness" to them) throughout the 20th century and very early 21st, from 1908 to 2010. It's titled "The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories". It contains 110 stories from various artists throughout that century, some straight horror, others sort of dark fantasy.

There's tons more that I could suggest, but this's already weeks of reading, at the least. Don't wanna completely swamp ya. \^_\^