This book of short stories, titled Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love is from the British Library Tales of the Weird series. It features 12 stories of doomed or dark romances from some best loved authors, from Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins to Angela Carter and Nalo Hopkinson. A nice snap shot of this type of spooky, doomed love story through time. From 1833 to 2000, and the last two stories are much more recent, from just a few years ago.

I recently have talked about a few series from the British Library. Most recently their hardback Gilded Nightmares series (find out more HERE) and before that, some of their Classic Crime paperback (you find that HERE). This book is from a paperback series called Tales of the Weird, which is features themed books of short stories gathered together under a theme, and showcasing the more rare or overlooked stories from some best loved or even forgotten favorite authors. According to Goodreads, there are 55 titles in the series, with titles like The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways and Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic. From a quick look, I can also tell that some are collected tales from one particular author as well, like Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson. I’ve had my eye on this series for a while, because I love these kinds of stories and I love the cover designs, which are generally one vibrant color contrasting with black and a dark, evocative cover illustration. This is my first one in this series that I’ve gotten my hands on, and I was very excited to read it.

Like the Gilded Nightmares series, this book started with a nice introduction from the editor, talking about the unifying theme of the stories here and a little bit about why that’s important. Each individual story also gets it’s own short introduction about the author and a little of the context. Here, the stories are all themed around romance with a twist. Romance as a genre often works on stereotypes and tropes, things like enemies to lovers, damsels in distress, or even tough women who need taming in some way. Things like obsession, helplessness and death are made romantic, meaning that a thread of abuse or toxic love can often be hidden in these stories. Also, there’s the idea that a dead woman is forever young and beautiful, captured in time, and unable to bother her biographers with her flaws, or by having wants and needs of her own, according to our editor, and so, in the teeth of this notion, the editor throws these stories that subvert the trope, with women who bite back, are predatory, or in other ways, defy the patriarchal view of them. I think that’s a really wonderful organizing principal, and it’s fun to turn things on their head and explore these themes and ideas from a different angle, though I have to say, while some romance stories can be toxic or down right silly, I by no means think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I feel like a lot of criticism of the romance genre comes from it being considered a women’s genre, and therefore suspect or non-intellectual in some way. What is life without a little romance, after all? People suffer under too much reality. But that’s beside the point here. To get back to it, the author also makes the point that often in the past, romance as a genre has not had a lot of diversity, and so has made sure to include some stories from a range of authors.

At first glance, seeing Mary Shelley’s name and Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu in this list of stories, this feels like the editors intention will be well demonstrated. But as I was reading these, while I think a lot of them fit the title as being a of a dark take on a romantic theme or story, there were more happy endings and fairytale tropes than you’d think. A few times I found myself thinking, this can’t end well… but then it actually did. I think the stories are dark romances, but frequently not doomed, though some are. They definitely work as a collection and I liked the ones that were chosen, almost totally. But they didn’t feel subversive to me or like they really broke the tropes that the editor was trying to.

As far as doomed romantic tales go, Carmilla is perhaps an obvious choice to include here. It’s actually a novella and not a short story, and takes up about a quarter of the whole volume. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I think it makes the book uneven, but on the other hand, it’s such a good fit. Carmilla, if you don’t know it already, is an early vampire story, one that may have influenced, in part, Bram Stokers famous tale. Though by modern standards, it’s fairly tame, it’s story has Sapphic overtones, as the beautiful and strange Carmilla becomes the guest of a young, naive girl in her remote castle home, and obsesses over her, all before the truth comes out that she’s a vampire who preys on young women. It’s a good story, plenty of drama, and since it’s about a predatory love, it fits, but I think since it also was written by a man and the nice straight girl is restored to ordinary societally accepted (at the time) relationships at the end of the story, it feels a bit more like a male fantasy than a subversive romance, if you’re going to get nit-picky about it. Definitely doomed though.

I won’t go through the whole list and say why I think most of them don’t prove the editors premise. I will say that this book of stories was very enjoyable. The one by Mary Shelley and Mary Elizabeth Braddon I really liked. They both are gothic romance stories, I’d say, and really nice reading. The one included from Willkie Collins was quite touching, and showed some tropes of Victorian doomed romance: a handsome captain remains true to his deceased and gone love. Alice Perrin was a new name to me, and I liked her story about a satisfying end to an abusive relationship. The early part of the book feels cohesive, and when we get to Angela Carters story, you can feel the shift into the more modern era. The writing style and tone is different and this story is a dark fairytale, very dramatic and quite satisfying.

Then the last few stories feel like they don’t quite fit, to me. They are all quite new, relatively, with two from 2000 and two from circa 2020. Tracy Fahy story I quite liked, with it’s museum setting and inspiration taken from the Anatomical Venus, and I think it fit the idea and atmosphere of the book as a whole somewhat, but it was written in 2021 and so it felt jarringly modern. Nalo Hopkinson and Kalamu Ya Salaam were both fine, and presented some fresh ideas and themes, and the last story was from V Castro, and I didn’t think it was a very strong story. These last three are all POC writers and they mostly fit the theme of being about relationships or even as dark fairytales, and I can see why they are included. But the authors are all from the Americas, and they’re all quite recent. I’m not sure about this series as a whole, I think I was under the impression that they featured more British authors or British literature, but perhaps they don’t. How great would a story by Zadie Smith, Meera Syal or Andrea Levy, just off the top of my head, have been as an inclusion here? Of course, the story would need to fit the theme and they may not be available for publication by British Library publishing, so I don’t mean to cast any shade here, but I’m aware that there has been a lot of talk about how POC authors in the UK find it hard to get published, and then in this book, when they could be, the editor has gone for overseas authors. Feels like a missed trick, to me. That said, it made me curious about reading more from these authors. Perhaps the British library might like to publish one of these anthologies just about eerie stories from the Caribbean or from the tradition of South American Magic Realism (one of my favourite genres).

On the whole, this was a great little volume of stories with a range of styles and ideas around the darker side of relationships or somewhat doomed romances. I really liked a lot of the stories, I didn’t hate any of them, and I’ll definitely be looking out for more of the books in this great series. I do recommend it.

Read It If: you have ever lost your lover. Vampires, castles, lovers, ghostly women and bad boys, this is a great collection of stories about the other side of romance.

Thank you to the publisher for the copy of this book for review.