Charles L. Grant - A Glow of Candles

[andydecker]

Charles L. Grant – A Glow of Candles and other Stories (Berkley Books, 1981, 211 pages)



Jill Baumann

Content:
Charles L. Grant: Preface
A Crowd of Shadows (1976)
Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose (1978)
Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street (1974)
Come Dance with Me on My Pony's Grave (1973)
The Three of Tens (1975)
The Dark of Legends, the Light of Lies (1977)
Caesar, Now Be Still (1978)
White Wolf Calling (1975)
The Rest Is Silence (1974)
When All the Children Call My Name (1977)
Secrets of the Heart (1980)
A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye (1977)

The second of Grant's collection. I absolutely love the cover. The collection is fairly standard for its time. Each story gets a short introduction by the writer. All stories were published beforehand in magazines or theme anthologies, a few are sf. Some were already in the first collection Tales from the Nightside , but as this existed only as a Arkham hardcover at the time, I guess they thought here of the wider audience.

[dem]

That cover painting is indeed very beautiful. First time I saw it was in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell and you just knew from then on copies would only exchange hands at heart-attack prices.

I like CLG. For all that he is praised/ blamed for specialising in some of the bleakest, loneliest "quiet horror," he could raise the volume should the mood take him - Eyes in Alan Ryan's Halloween Horror being a nasty example. I still think Penny Daye is great.