Some have been reprinted through the years – Bram Stoker’s’ The Squaw’, for example, though this is one of his lesser known tales (and involves no vampires!)– and yet there are many other near-unknown tales that deserve a revivification. Though the names may not necessarily be familiar, titles like ‘ Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets’ (Jack Finney), ‘The Library’ (Hester Holland) and ‘The Horror in the Museum’ (Hazel Heald) pretty much tell you what to expect. Forester, and Seabury Quinn – to others which are less so these days – Hester Holland, L.P.
We have twenty-two tales, from some familiar names – as well as the aforementioned Bram Stoker, there’s also Jack Finney, Nigel Kneale, C.S. So: in this reissue, with a new introduction by Johnny Mains, we have a new edition of a book that otherwise stays the same, even down to the original cover of a black cat’s face on a black background (related to the Bram Stoker tale in the book) and the 3’6 price label in the bottom right corner of the cover. When you ask many of the present day genre writers – Stephen Jones, Clive Barker, Mark Morris, Phillip Pullman – it is this series they remember that affected them when younger. On its original issue it was seen as something garish and unpleasant, its horrific tales too gruesome and unsettling for many. This book is a glorious reissue of the first in a series of thirty horror books that delimited and defined many a British horror reader for over twenty-five years.
Let me tell you of a dirty little secret, reissued from the UK’s pulp past.
Published by Pan Macmillan, October 2010 (Review copy received)
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