Peter Haining's last horror book(s)

[claytwisted]

Let me start by saying that I miss my friend a good deal. Peter and I never met face to face but enjoyed a correspondence over the ten years or so. I'm afraid that I was sometimes merciless when he let haste get in the way of research, but he never took offense at my comments. I realize now that when you're working on as many things as he customarily did at one time without an assistant, errors can occur and I'd much rather have the books he completed warts and all than not have them...

Anyway, some months before he passed Peter approached me about a few authors that he thought might make for interesting entries in the Dancing Tuatara Press line-up. There were a couple of Weird Tales authors that I wasn't at all keen on but one project he suggested caught my attention... Peter (thinking incorrectly that neither author had enough material for a solo book) suggested a "double" collecting the Weird Tales appearances of Anthony Rud and Robert Spencer Carr. Peter apparently didn't recall that Carr had a collection published back in the small press boom of the 1950s that is still readily available (Beyond Infinity), but Anthony Rud was another matter entirely...

Most of you probably know Rud as the author who had the first cover story in Weird Tales ("Ooze"). What isn't as well known is that in addition to a handful of weird yarns, he also authored a series of novels involving one Jigger Masters that tread the line of weird menace and in one case weird menace and "yellow peril" (or SOFM (Sons of Fu Manchu) as I prefer to call the sub-genre). Anyway, Peter's vision has been recognized in two omnibus volumes, each containing a handful of weird tales and a full-length novel. Now when I say "full-length novel" I'm not speaking pulp editor and indicating a work of 15,000 words with wide margins, no, I mean a full book-length work of probably 80,000 words. The first volume, The Place of Hairy Death should be out in time for the Yule festivities and features the novel The Stuffed Men and a handful of stories. The second book which includes the novel House of the Damned and another handful of tales will be out next year. These two books may not have been exactly what Peter had envisioned, but we do have him to thank for their existence. I suspect that he would have liked them....