41. New Worlds of Fantasy #2 edited by Terry Carr

I generally avoid short stories, for many reasons, mainly that they are too all over the place in anthologies and rarely leave me satisfied. I found this one at Chainon and it had some good names and was a nice looking book, so I made an exception to the rule.  Each story has a neat little horizontal illustration at the top of the page that I found quite pleasing.  They were done Kelly Freas, who also did the cover (which I like less not because of the execution but the mode, silver-age abstraction of which I am not a huge fan).  I wish I could show you some but that would entail opening the book flat and the spine already cracked when I got to the end.

Overall, I found this anthology to be light, with a few bright spots.  Carr's intro did little to excite me, being pretty generic with a softball attempt to defend the genre of fantasy, which honestly isn't even well-represented here, the stories being more odd or supernatural than actual fantasy.  There was a lot of melancholy and those subtle ghost stories where nobody gets killed or anything.

There was one that really stood out for me, though, and that was The Scarlet Lady by Keith Roberts.  I wonder if Stephen King had read this, as it is basically Christine written 20 years earlier and taking place in England.  A mechanic's brother buys this massive old luxury vehicle that seems a nightmare from the beginning because it is so hard to get parts for, but then becomes a nightmare for real as it starts to rear off the road to mow down dogs, cats, cows and eventually humans.  The brother gets crazier and crazier as well, sneaking out to the garage at night to polish the car and stare at it.  This was a lot of fun.