Charles M. Collins - Fright

[dem bones]

Charles M. Collins (ed.) - Fright (Avon, 1963: reissued as Harvest Of Fear, Avon, 1975))

Charles M. Collins - Introduction
Charles M. Collins - A Foreword to The Forest Warden

E. T. A. Hoffman - The Forest Warden
J. S. LeFanu - Shalken The Painter
L. P. Hartley - Podolo
Seabury Quinn - Glamour
C. Hall Thompson - Clay
H. P. Lovecraft - The Horror At Red Hook

Inside cover blurb:

Can you recall the last time you suffered FRIGHT?
Perhaps you can, but you have nothing in common with the people in these six stories.
They carry the dry taste of fear with them day and night. It is there all the time, waiting . . . watching. FRIGHT has become the predominant emotion in their lives.
No, you have nothing in common with them
Or do you?

Covering two hundred years of horror and supernatural fiction in just the half dozen stories was always going to be a tough ask, so the editor opts for six with little or nothing in common beyond the fact that he likes them. Not since Phil Strong's The Other Worlds , whose blurb boasted stories "even better than Frankenstein, The Horla and The Mask Of Red Death" but still found space for sadistic surgeon nasty The House Where Time Stood Still, has that good, honest thrill provider Seabury Quinn enjoyed such esteemed company. Quinn dispenses with the services of De Grandin and Trowbridge for the duration of Glamour, a neat, vengeful witch story with a smidgen of lycanthrope, featuring evil hag Lucinda Lafferty, who adopts the form of an irresistibly beautiful young woman to ensnare young Harrington. Even when she's finally destroyed by a clued-in cleric, Harrington lives out his days on auto-pilot as he knows he's doomed never to be able to love another or find anything much to get enthused over. The E. T. A. Hoffman effort is a translation of the story better known as Ignaz Denner. A notorious bandit's diabolical bond with the Devil obliges him to sacrifice children to escape eternal damnation. In L. P. Hartley's Podolo, against all advise, the persistent Angela insists on taking a gondola out to a shunned island with only the narrator and their gondolier Marlo for company. On setting foot on Podolo, Angela discovers a terribly injured cat and is moved to put it out of its misery by caving in its head. But the creature proves evasive and leads her further inland, ever-closer to her doom ...