Yeah, I dunno. LOA volumes are sometimes more checkered than I expect. I'll be able to say more definitively after having read the second volume of this set, but ... a one volume-r with all the really essential stories might have been stronger. For every "What Was It?" here there is, unfortunately, a "The Moonstone Mass" (I could make very little of this one, but maybe it's just me). Maybe a quarter to a third of this volume's stories are really good. Straub's introduction isn't memorable, either ... and the copy-editing is oddly variable: suddenly a real mess in Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone" (I couldn't help noticing that in volume 2 while Davis Grubb is named correctly everywhere else, his name is altered to the more familiar -- but wrong in this case -- "David" in the page headings).

Maybe Straub just isn't that good an editor. I remember reading the table of contents for his Lovecraft LOA volume and thinking "You left out 'The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath' but included dreck like 'The Lurking Fear'? Huh." But I suppose no one will be happy with every choice. ( )

I appreciate the author's name at the top of the left page and the title of the short story on the top of the right page.
I appreciate the biographies. They are very thorough. I like the alphabetic sequence. The birth and death dates go very well with the story's publication date. For some reason, which I cannot justify, I need to know when the story was written/published (1948 or 1812) and the age of the author (24 or 72).

Specifics:

Sarah Orne Jewett, 'In Dark New England Days' (pages 112 to 130) - her dialogue is too colloquial. The reading is cumbersome.
Emma Francis Dawson, 'An Itinerant House' (pages 238 to 254) - very good.
Lafcadio Hearn, 'Yuki-Onna' (pages 282 to 286) - good.
Ambrose Bierce, 'The Moonlit Road' ( pages 302 to 311) - very good.
Edward Lucas White, ' Lukundoo' (pages 312 to 325) - very good.
Henry James, 'The Jolly Corner' (pages 337 to 370) - too wordy, verbose, eloquent. The reading is difficult.
Edith Wharton, 'Afterward' (pages 386 to 415) - much easier to read.
Willa Cather, 'Consequences' (pages 416 to 435) - on page 417 refers to a 'traffic block', in 1915!
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' (pages 510 to 535) - very well done. It was recently made into a major movie.
Seabury Quinn, 'The Curse of Everard Maundy' (pages 536 to 567) - I hope that I can find more of psychic detective Jules de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge, the main characters. According to the author biographies "From 1925 to 1951 Quinn wrote 93 such stories". Quinn was 36 to 62 years during that period.

Some printing errors:
Page 9, line 26, "of it it was". In my opinion, the second "it" is an error.
Page 61, line 16, "We arc in a" should be "We are in a".
Page 125, line 6, "Mis' Dow" totally confuses me.
Etc.

I wrote this, from my notes, several months after actually reading the book. ( )

Not a bad collection. There's some really good tales that I haven't read before. I do think that perhaps they included a few too many stories. I would suspect that there's not as many horror/scary/terror stories as some folks might be expecting.

Most of the folks included in the collection probably won't come to a surprise as a fan of short American literature. There's an occasional lesser known author, but I was hoping for a story by Kenneth Morris. ( )