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Post by dem bones on Mar 14, 2008 17:11:10 GMT
August Derleth (ed.) - Over The Edge (Arrow, 1976) William Hope Hodgson - The Crew Of The Lancing H. R. Wakefield - The Last Meeting Of Two Old Friends H. P. Lovecraft - The Shadow In The Attic John Metcalfe - The Renegade Clark Ashton Smith - Told In The Desert Frank Belknap Long - When The Rains Came Robert E. Howard - The Blue Flame Of Vengeance Jesse Stuart - Crabgrass Carl Jacobi - Kincaid's Car August Derleth - The Patchwork Quilt Fritz Leiber - The Black Gondolier J. Vernon Shea - The Old Lady's Room Joseph Payne Brennan - The North Knoll Mary E. Counselman - The Huaco Of Senor Perez David A. Johnstone - Mr. Alucard John Pocsik - Casting The Stone Michael Bailey - Aneaonoshian J. Ramsey Campbell - The Stone On The Island A lost ship manned by demons of the sea.
A mass murderer whose spirit returns to kill again.
A deadly Inca curse that spans the centuries.
Here are eighteen nightmarish tales by masters of the macabre, none of which have ever appeared in paperback before.
Tales of horror, madness and the supernatural.
Tales to drive you over the edge. A Weird Tales reunion in all but name, but so far, this isn't as exciting as it ought to be. Well, at least there's Hodgson writing at somewhere near his best, as a subterranean earthquake lets loose an ancient horror on The Crew Of The Lancing: "Crawling about the decks now visible in the thinning mist, were the most horrible creatures I have ever seen.In spite of their unearthly strangeness I had a feeling that there was something familiar about them. They were like nothing so much as men. They had bodies the shape of seals, but of a dead, unhealthy white colour. The lower part ended in a sort of curved tail on which they had two long, snaky feelers, and at the end a very human-like hand with talons instead of nails - fearsome parodies of humans." In Mr. Alucard, the title character lives in a castle and has Mrs. Grimm charge five shillings a head extra for the tourists to "see the vampire sleeping in his coffin." Even she must have her suspicions about him, what with Sheba the cat terrified of him and the American boy who "almost fainted when he touched your face. He said you were so cold you must be dead." And then there are his nocturnal habits. Crabgrass is the type of ghost story I can cheerfully do without. A father returns to instruct his son how to lead his life and gripe that he's not keeping the grave tidy.
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 23, 2009 10:02:14 GMT
Ramsey Campbell's "The Stone on the Island" is an overlooked gem - at first I assumed it was one of his very early Lovecraftian pieces, but in fact it's a lot more in the vein of his early 70s work in Demons by Daylight. Without wanting to give too much away, three quarters of the way through there's a plot twist which manages to be both funny and utterly horrific at the same time, in a way which is distinctively Campbell's.
Elsewhere, Leiber's "The Black Gondolier" didn't really work for me, although I generally like his stuff a lot, and the tale is well-regarded. Metcalfe's "The Renegade" is as funny and well-written as always, but it doesn't have much of a plot, and the ending is a bit too arch for my liking. Still, any story containing a dream sequence featuring a vampiric were-rhino in a top hat must be doing something right...
I tend not to bother even looking at the Derleth-as-Lovecraft stories, but the Robert E. Howard piece completed by John Pocsik was actually a lot of fun, in a very pulpy way.
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