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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Avon Paperback Horror Anthologies edited by Charles M. Collins

Quick post while I finish up a haunted house novel and prepare a review: I have no idea who Charles M. Collins is, but in the late 1960s he put together three anthologies of horror fiction of the classic sort, stories by Stoker, Bierce, Polidori, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Lovecraft, and other much lesser-known folks. Avon's cover art - artist unknown - is creepy and yet slightly comic at once.

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5 comments:

  1. Barrymore TebbsJanuary 17, 2012 at 2:19 PM

    Hey Will
    I sent an email to your Hotmail addy
    BT

    ReplyDelete
  2. gef the talking mongooseJanuary 31, 2012 at 9:59 AM

    Loved these when I came across them on the newsstands as a kid. HARVEST, in particular, introduced me to C. Hall Thompson, famously pretty much banished from Lovecraftian fiction (&, apparently by extension, the halls of horror, period ... he wound up writing westerns) by August Derleth for supposedly poaching on HPL's basic concepts without Augie's permission. The story here, "Clay," isn't one of those (the offenders were "The Will of Claude Ashur" & "Spawn of the Green Abyss," which if memory serves -- I haven't read them in nigh unto 30 years, in the pages of the actual WEIRD TALES issues from the Univ. of Arizona's closed stacks -- were deemed too close for comfort to "Thing on the Doorstep" & "Shadow over Innsmouth," respectively) but it's a great tale, period.

    (For years now I've been living with the lie that Thompson's fourth WEIRD TALES story, "The Pale Criminal," was found in one of the other two Collins-edited anthologies, but I learned from Google just now that it's in Marvin Kaye's BROTHER THEODORE's CHAMBER OF HORRORS instead. Dunno if you've covered that one, but it's certainly worth looking for, I'd say.)

    Anyway, just found this blog via a search for the author (whose name I couldn't quite recall) of SEARCH FOR JOSEPH TULLY. Looks great!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Will ErricksonJanuary 31, 2012 at 10:11 AM

    Wow, Gef thanks for commenting - I love hearing about forgotten horror writers. As you may have guessed! But learning that Brother Theodore put together a horror anthology--! Woah.

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  4. panjandrumApril 15, 2016 at 1:29 PM

    I bought Harvest of Fear and Feast of Blood back in the '70s. I loved the cover art and the stories were all excellent. There's another Avon book in this series that I'm aware of, albeit edited by Kirby McCauley:
    Night Chills

    ReplyDelete
  5. highwaykneesOctober 6, 2019 at 9:53 AM

    Avon had some great illustrators working on their covers in the 60s and 70s! These are prime examples. I could show you more from my collection. Some of which are literary fiction of a "dark bent", though not strictly horror.Check out the speculative fiction collections by Zenna Henderson, or the horror story collections by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia.

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