Marvin Kaye - Masterpieces Of Terror ...

I love that cover - sounds like a damn good collection too!
;D

I forgot to mention, the stories are divided into sections, each of them prefigured by a short introduction by Kaye who really is on outstanding form throughout. Fiends and Creatures comprises Dracula's Guest through to Hoch's The Faceless Thing. Lovers and Other Monsters - there's a title for you - begins with The Anchor and ends on Level's supremely cheerless Night And Silence. Asimov's Flies introduces Acts of God and Other Horrors, Lazarus drives home the coffin nail. The Beast Within, Burrage's The Waxwork up to and including Ellin's memoir of a state executioner, The Question. Finally, Ghosts and Miscellaneous Nightmares is everything from Maupassant's The Flayed Hand onward.

Leonid Andreyev - Lazarus: We hear no more of Lazarus in the Bible once Jesus has raised him from the dead, leaving Andreyev free to fill us in on the further adventures of a forgotten, aimless, animated corpse!

"And in the evening, when the sun, reddening and growing wider, would come nearer and nearer the western horizon, the blind Lazarus would slowly follow it. He would stumble against stones and fall, stout and weak as he was, would rise heavily to his feet and walk on again, and on the red screen of the sunset his black body and outspread hands would form a monstrous likeness of a cross."

Edward D. Hoch - The Faceless Thing: It's widely accepted that his sister drowned tragically when they were kids, but he knows she was dragged to her doom by the tunnel-bound nameless, faceless creature from the ooze! Fifty years later, he returns to the derelict old farmstead to confront the monster for the last time.

Maurice Level - Night And Silence:A pair of wretched beggars - one blind, the other a deaf mute, both crippled - freeze the night away in their hovel. The third of their number, a woman, has just died and is lying in her coffin in the same room. The blind man hears scratchings and muffled cries coming from within the box …

Walt Whitman - Death In The Schoolroom (A Fact): Sadistic teacher Legare wrongly believes that pupil Tim Barker has stolen melons from Mr. Nichols garden and accuses him before the class. Tim's pitiful circumstances (Whitman lays them on with a trowel) make it impossible for him to explain what he was doing at the scene of the crime without bringing down grief upon his saintly widowed mother. Legare is very pleased about this as he's good as guaranteed a pleasant afternoon's boy torture. He gives Tim an hour to loosen his tongue before he flogs him in front of the class, then continues with the lesson. When the sixty minutes are up, Tim's fallen asleep at his desk. Legare advances, ratan in hand ....

Patricia Highsmith - The Quest For Blank Claveringi: Dr. Clavering has always dreamt of discovering a rare creature and bestowing his name on it, so when he hears rumours of a giant man-eating snail on the uninhabited island of Kuwa, he packs his safari suit and camera and hires a boat. The snail - ten yards long and fifteen high approx. - is certainly no figment, but he hadn’t counted on it having a mate. Lumbering and slow they may be, but his prey are possessed of fiendish cunning ….

Pierre Courtois - The Silent Couple: The Mezanges, an old, crippled couple, united only in their misery and old age. She is "a dutiful, obedient wife" in all ways, save that she refuses to speak one word to him. Two years ago, he'd dragged her along to a Casino where he lost heavily. Spotting a stylishly dressed, well-to-do woman in the street, he throttles her in front of his horrified wife, dumps her body in a roadside ditch and makes away with her money.

And now a car pulls up just before the bench where the Mezanges sit in silence. The chauffeur gets out and walks to the fountain to fetch a drink for his mistress - the well-to-do woman! She didn't die after all! What if she recognises them?

A. M. Burrage - The Waxwork: Raymond Hewson, a journalist down on his luck, decides, for purposes of an article, to spend a night alone in the Murderers Den at the Waxworks. Among the replicas of such charmers as Crippen is a particular model, that of Dr. Bourdette, ‘The French Jack The Ripper’, which really disturbs him, and as the night drags on he can’t help but be anxious that the cut throat was never captured …

Saki - The Easter Egg: Much to his mother, Lady Barbara's shame, Lester Slaggby is a timid creature, ever keen to avoid even the remotest possibility of personal injury. Naturally, Saki sees to it that, when an explosive is concealed inside the Easter egg a little girl is to present to the Burgomaster, Lester is the only person in the crowd who realises that he's in the presence of an unwitting infant suicide bomber (!). Showing remarkable courage, Lester leaps into the fray, only to become involved in an ungainly wrestle with the child (who's been promised sweets after all). An outrageously cruel six pager.

Ambrose Bierce - One Summer Night: Henry Armstrong is a victim of premature burial. Lucky for him, within hours of being planted in the soil, two medical students hire big negro Jess the cemetery caretaker to dig him up to furnish their dissecting table. On second thoughts, maybe "lucky" isn't the right word ...

That, along with his instructive introductions and notes, are Kaye's great strengths as an anthologist for me. Come to think of it, you don't really need too many more, do you? Maybe the ability to translate from the original language, but he has that base covered, too!

I'm sure we all accept we're gonna get the fail-safe Dracula's Guest's and Carmilla's in a collection of this nature, but there are so many stories i've not found elsewhere. As you say, some may not exactly warrant 'Masterpiece' status, but they are at worst interesting.

So glad you tackled Oshidori! My notes for that were about twice the length of the story and still unutterably crap.