Nightwebs

Book #3 for 2024 (the first one I actually started, as noted before, but the third actually finished). Here’s the thing, though; I actually started this 20-odd years ago but never actually finished it. Nightwebs was a posthumous collection of Woolrich stories that mostly hadn’t been reprinted or collected since their first appearance, and Gollancz included it in their Crime Masterworks series that they did back then (smaller companion to the contemporaneous) SF and fantasy series, and I have that paperback. Which I started reading, and was rather enjoying, but, as I tend to do with collections like this, I reached a point where I thought “this is good but I want to read something else for a while and come back to this later”, put it aside, and did not in fact come back to it. And then I had a notion to give Woolrich another go at last much more recently, found a slightly bodgy digital copy, and settled down to finish it at last. Except that in doing so, I discovered my old paperback was actually not the full collection, and the original edition (from which my ebook had been made) actually contained sixteen stories, not twelve, plus an extensive bibliography of all of Woolrich’s known work. Why Gollancz’ version left those out I don’t know, but anyway that’s why it took me sixteen days to read the book in full rather than twelve.

Be all that as it may. Like I said, this is a posthumous collection of then-uncollected stuff, so I don’t know if it’s really a proper best-of as such, but Francis Nevins’ endnotes for each story generally hail them as the best example of the sort of thing they are which Woolrich wrote, so. Most of the contents date from the 30s, when he was preposterously prolific after turning to pulp magazine outlets, with a few examples of his later (and lesser) output; it’s a fairly bleak world he depicts, shot through with often grim irony, horrible coincidences, and, in the later tales, outright cruelty (“Too Nice a Day to Die” in particular could also justly be called “Go Fuck Yourselves”), but also one with some frankly bizarre aspects to it (particularly “Graves for the Living”, which borders on the positively gothic). I suppose it’s a fair introduction to Woolrich, all up, although I obviously haven’t read enough to really know for sure; maybe one of the novels (particularly Night Has a Thousand Eyes) is better for that sort of thing? Either way, now that there’s legit ebook editions of his books available, I’m going to be checking the novels out too. As for Nightwebs, I think we can say it was worth the 20-something-year wait to finish…