Out of this World: An Anthology of Fantasy

I recently inherited all of my late grandmother's books.  After finishing The Thorn Birds, I chose a book at random from a box that came from her collection.  The one that I pulled was this one.  Generally speaking, I like fantasy and so the title sounded interesting.  Plus, this collection has some surprisingly famous authors in its pages.  The most surprising was probably Jack London, who I know from his books like White Fang and The Call of the Wild, both of which I read as a child.  In this collection, his contribution is dark, post-apocalyptic story, which is very different from the brand of wilderness adventure that I am used to seeing from him.

This is my copy, the lines are some sort of plastic cover that has developed linear bubbles.

This is not really fantasy in the modern sense. There isn't any unicorns or centaurs or really magic. This is an older definition of fantasy. In addition to the story about the world trying to recover from an apocalyptic plague, there is, for example, a story about people who live in department stores and their feud with the night watchman. All of the stories could be described as “fantastical” if someone tried to convince you that they actually happened, but would not be what you would expect from the fantasy section of your local book store.

Some other famous contributors were H.G. Welles with his vision of the last judgment and Oscar Wilde and his story about a British ghost that becomes exasperated with Americans. H.G. Welles’s story has his same biting style of cynical commentary as many of his other works but it is much more humorous than some of his other stories and Oscar Wilde's story shows how America (and really the world) has moved beyond tradition ghosts in horror.

The story behind this book was that it was compiled by a Sergeant named Julius Fast during World War II of the soldiers favorite short stories read. It is sort of interesting to imagine a different generation reading these stories in their makeshift quarters somewhere in Europe or the Pacific while I am sitting reading these over a hot meal in my comfortable apartment.

I think the thing about this book that I will talk about the most later on is Robert Arthur's "The Devil and Sam Shay" which is about a man winning a bet with devil, and the devil, furious, curses him with never being able to win another bet again and the story explores the aftermath. The character behaves rationally and does exactly what I would have done in the situation. It is great example of making the best of a bad situation.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.