Terror Tales of London

[benedictjjones]

Found this to be a rather mixed bag all in all. Some of the stories were excellent and I really enjoyed “Undesirable Residence” by Barbara Roden, "The Tiger" by Nina Allan and "Angels of London" by Adam Nevill. The small tid-bits of London's history and folklore that were dotted throughout the volume were great. Several things in this anthology reminded me of the old 'One Eye Grey' magazines.
The stories I liked the least were “Someone to Watch Over You” by Marie O'Regan and “The Bloody Tower” by Anna Taborska.
The issues with this anthology I did have were two-fold;that some of the stories could be set anywhere really and weren't london specific enough (for me...) this even affects on of my favourite stories in the anthology - 'the angels of london' which could have been called 'the angels of *insert name of any metropolis in western world*'. My other issue was that some walked on well trodden ground - a london 'horror' story about the temple of mithras (what ANOTHER one).
All in all there was enough quality to make me think about picking up one of the other volumes but enough issues to make me rather wary.

[karswell]

I enjoyed this one, thought it was stronger than the last two (The Cotswolds and East Anglia) which I have to admit to skipping through towards the end. The Lake District Tales are still the strongest collection I think.

There were some clunkers - I agree about The Bloody Tower - but I was very impressed with The Tiger and Train, Night and thought Adam Nevill's story was great. Take your point about the "London-ness" of it though - not sure which one captured the spirit of the city best, The Thames maybe..?

[benedictjjones]

'train, night' was excellent and spot on for a London anthology for me as was 'the thames' both exactly the kind of stories that anchor the anthology to the locale - if the anthology as a whole were a mix of those types with the nevills etc then I think it would've really hit me.
on a side note 'the soldier' (temple of mithras story) was written more than a decade before those I've read previously so...should probably retract my earlier comments!
Also I really liked 'perry in serglio' but felt that was more grounded in time than place(??)

Might try the Lake District one, cheers! I am a sucker for locale based anthologies - as the pile of more than twenty akashik noir city books attest!