The Best of Weird Tales: 1923

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Summary: Attention Weird Fiction Fans!
Review: This anthology is a must for fans of weird fiction. Today most copies of Weird Tales from tha time period can cost Anywhere between $100 and $1000. This anthology allows us to read some of the stories that appeared in The Unique Magazine in its heyday. A must read for doe hard weird fiction fans.

Rating:
Summary: The Best of Weird Tales: 1923
Review: This is an enticing collection on the face of it, mainly because of the reputation of Weird Tales, and how expensive it would be to retain the issues from which these stories have been culled; but after sampling all the stories collected here as "the Best", I confess to overall disappointment.

This collection merely sets the table, and invites the reader to sit down. Weirdly enough, my favourite stories in the bunch probably qualify as the least weird. I liked the stark, bitter message of The Bloodstained Parasol, where a young woman just can't accept what her science-minded paramour does for a living--no ghosts or zombies here, just a quick look, back in 1923(!) at the inhumanity of scientific investigation. Then there's the story called, clunkily, The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other, which actually features two greedy fools who thought they murdered each other but didn't. Nevertheless, they get another chance to do it all over again at the climax.
Another quietly successful story with no supernatural elements: The Man Who Owned The World. Besides another jab at how science, far from being a boon, can be a curse for everyday man, it suggests that perhaps a dreamland is a happier place than reality.
Then we have the other stories, full of man-eating plants, phantom hearts, sinister incantations of devil-worshippers, and the hateful death-magic of an old Kahuna. But these weird tales just don't seem weird enough for this reader of the twenty-first century. The plot twists are simple, predictable, mostly leading nowhere except to some cheerless last line that gives us another raving madman, or another lesson in trite supernatural retribution. I started begging for some kind of twist-ending, some kind of shake-up to the recurring formula.
Most of the stories, then, are short, well-written if a bit heavy-handed, and fairly forgettable--starring a lot of small people who inevitably get what they deserve, served up either by human hands, or the unknown. This short collection might have been done in by part of the editorial policy; the editors provide inserts that comment on the state of the magazine each month, and in doing so, tip us off to all the great stories that were NOT included because they only wanted each author, no matter how consistent, represented once, or because they felt some stories, apparently marvellous, had been anthologized too much already and so somehow didn't need to be represented here. It gets a bit frustrating hitting upon this sort of commentary repeatedly, causing the deduction that perhaps this is not, after all, really The Best of Weird Tales: 1923.
Perhaps a key collection for die-hard Weird Tales fans only, and I have a feeling that Lovecraft's first story, Dagon, is accessible elsewhere--probably in those other anthologies which contain all the Weird Tales we didn't get here.