The Macabre Megapack
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Lafcadio Hearn. The Macabre Megapack
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This book is for Tara, Chloe and Ella.
This led me not to any ready conclusion but rather to a still larger question: have we erred in considering the author as a hero of sorts? I recollected developing such sentiments regarding Ernest Hemingway during my youth, and expending unwarranted time in reading his complete works, many of which were not worthy of my time: “The Torrents of Spring,” “The Green Hills of Africa,” “Across the River and Into the Trees,” and so on. It had thus become evident to me quite early in life that it is a mistake to assume that everything by a Great Author is indeed great literature. Now I was led to a comparable but somewhat different conjecture, a sort of mirror reflection of the first, one might say: if it may said that not everything by a author deemed great is great, then might the reverse not also hold true, and lead us to let fall into obscurity exceptionally fine writing, simply because the author only rarely—perhaps even only once—touched true greatness? What would happen if I reconfigured my favorite genre of literature—the macabre tales of the early 19th century—in terms of the writing, and not the writer? Was this single masterful tale by an otherwise mediocre writer really all that unique? Macabre had been a thriving genre for more than forty years; most of it consisted of short stories, of which the bulk that survives in our esteem is assigned to a mere handful of authors. What else was there, other than the stories of Poe, Hawthorne and a few others? What writers did they know, work with, and often admire?
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Now she herself—so runs the tale—
Wanders o’er earth, a Vampyre pale.
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