Dark mind, dark heart

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This anthology of more or less "old-fashioned" horror tales offers new, hitherto unpublished work by such masters of the genre as Robert Bloch, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, John Metcalfe, H. Russell Wakefield, Carl Jacobi, Robert E. Howard, William Hope Hodgson, Joseph Payne Brennan—and brings into print for the first time a final, revised version of M. P. Shiel's Xelucha, prepared before his death, and the initial work in book form of George Wetzel, Frank Mace, Dennis Roidt, and John Ramsey Campbell, a Lovecraftian who is adding appreciably to the Cthulhu Mythos in a British setting. The editor, in his brief foreword, suggests that such an anthology as this is "almost an anachronism in this nuclear age, the potential horrors of which far exceed anything heretofore conceived in the creative imagination of man." But the horrors conceived in this book are not such as are likely to be rejected by the mind of man; they range from battle gore in Howard's The Grey God Passes to the symbolic horror of David Keller's In Memoriam, from Hodgson's weird horror of the sea, The Habitants of Middle Islet, to the modern psychiatric horror of Wakefield's The Animals in the Case. This collection offers variety in its horrors, from cold grue to physical and psychic torment. It is a book of curiously memorable tales in a division of literature which is currently in a period of transition, a book which will have an instant appeal to all those readers whose inclination toward the outre has not faltered.