A Fitzgerald rarity - or it was, until they made the movie

Coming across "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in "American Fantastic Tales" is like opening a window and getting a proverbial breath of fresh air. And why is that? For some reason, virtually every story in the anthology, in the genre of horror/fantasy, up through about 1920, is written in an overwrought, fustian prose, prose furnished like a Victorian parlor, and here comes Fitzgerald and the writing is clean and crisp and modern - Shaker-style, by comparison. It's partly his excellence as a writer (though some of the others in this anthology are excellent in their own right, but their prose seems to look backward, whereas Fitzgerald's looks forward); it's also, to be fair, that the subject matter of Button is quite different from most of the others stories in the anthology: it is certainly "fantastic" - story of a baby born as an old man whose life unfolds in reverse, as he gets younger through the years - but it doesn't have the sense of the grotesque, the loneliness, the gloom, the ghastly that all of the others have. It's almost comic in tone; it's a fantasy of the "what-if" variety, establishing a premise and then letting it play out. Should there be more such stories included? Well, I don't think there are many such stories (though this one has spurred some imitators recently - at least one recent novel ripped off the entire theme). Button had been a pretty obscure Fitzgerald story, but it's now better known because of the movie. I was amazed how much the movie embellished on this rather skeletal plot - not for the better.