Leo Margulies - Weird Tales

[dem bones]

Leo Margulies (ed.) - Weird Tales (Pyramid, May 1964)

Introduction - Leo Margulies

Edmond Hamilton - The Man Who Returned
Fritz Leiber - Spider Mansion
Robert Bloch - A Question Of Etiquette
Nictzin Dyalhis - The Sea Witch
H. P. Lovecraft - The Strange, High House In The Mist
August W. Derleth - The Drifting Snow
Frank Belknap Long jnr - The Body Masters
Robert E. Howard - Pigeons From Hell

Spider Mansion: The head, its golden hair disarranged, lolled backward. The arms stretched taut to either side. Then I began to see the thin opalescently grayish strands that twined around her wrists and arms, and wrapped around her skirt, drawing it tight against her legs. The strands seemed to radiate off in all directions. My flashlight roved out across the glimmering network. Horror and revulsion rooted me to the spot where I stood. The thing was a gigantic spiderweb.

Tom and Helen Egan drop in on the old Orne House to escape a storm. The last time Tom met Malcolm Orne he was a midget, but now the guy's seven foot tall and married to the beautiful, if strangely terrified Cynthia. Orne is a maniac and a sadist who has avenged himself on all who he considers to have disparaged him when he was Johnny no-legs, including his brother and the surgeon responsible for his startling transformation. He keeps everyone in check with the help of his pet, a murderous giant spider.

August Derleth - The Drifting Snow: Aunt Mary insists the curtains remain drawn after sunset. When Henry decides to open them, he sees two beckoning figures outside. It transpires that a servant girl froze to death on the Western slope after being dismissed from the house during a snowstorm.

Edmond Hamilton - The Man Who Returned: John Woodward awakens to find himself encoffined in the family vault. Buried alive! Terrified, he struggles and scrapes until he eventually frees himself, and staggers off home to tell his wife the good news. A lot has changed in the time he's been away ...

[Calenture]

I think this is another enviable book. Howard's Pigeons From Hell was of course a legendary episode from the old Thriller series hosted by Boris Karloff 1960-62.

I believe I saw that show twice a long time back, and remember it as very creepy. There are VHS tapes available (said to be public domain) and the complete Thriller series on DVD (and if it's public domain then the DVDs might be home made from the tapes).

I found this review on this IMDB page

"Thriller" was a fantastic black & white TV series hosted by Boris Karloff that did adaptions of classic weird tales such as Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" & Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons From Hell"- In that story, the inhabitants of a southern plantation (that utilized slaves from the west indies), all disappear. Many years later--in a hair-raising moment that has to stand as one of literature's & television's greatest scares--it's revealed that one of the daughters was turned into a "zuvumbie" by one of the West Indian slaves. She slaughters whoever comes to the deserted old plantation by burying a hatchet in their brain!

I've never found the original story but I'm tempted to get it on Amazon. Haven't seen the Leiber story, either. As I said, enviable.

[dem bones]

Yeah, in Danse Macabre Stephen King raves about Pigeons From Hell, both Howard's original ("one of the finest horror stories of our century") and the Thriller episode ("Some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV": King disagrees, but loves "the young man staggering blindly down the stairs of the decaying mansion with a hatchet buried in his head"). Another good place to find it - especially if you're a fan of Howard in horror mode - is:

Robert E. Howard - Pigeons From Hell & Other Weird & Fantastic Tales (Zebra, June 1976)

Illustration: Jeff Jones

Glenn Lord - Introduction

Pigeons From Hell
The Gods Of Bal-Sagoth
People Of The Dark
Children Of The Night
The Dead Remember
The Man On The Ground
The Garden Fear
The Hyena
Dig Me No Grave
The Dream Snake
In The Forest Of Villefere
Old Garfield's Heart
The Voice Of El-Lil

[Calenture]

Naturally I've begun to wonder if Pigeons From Hell would live up to my memory of it. Let's face it, I wasn't that old when I saw it. All I remember is a creaky flight of stairs in the mansion with something threatening at the top and a lot of pigeons fluttering about below...

But the collection above seems better than Glenn Lord's Howard Collector, which is really just for collectors, with a lot of Howard's college magazine essays and only a few stories.

There are an unusual number of previously-unseen books appearing here. Previously-unseen by me, I mean. All 8 covers on the Haining tribute page and the two above, for starters. It makes me wonder how good distribution really was in the heady Seventies and Eighties...