Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell (1979): The Sunshine Bores the Daylights Outta Me

Another vintage horror fiction paperback cover that has precisely nothing to do with its contents. This May 1979 Jove reprint of Ramsey Campbell's first non-Lovecraftian short story collection Demons By Daylight features some strikingly vivid cover art. But as I recall, there are exactly no snake-demons horny for hot human ladies in silver space-age bikinis in these tales. Somebody forgot to tell artist unknown that. While it would indeed catch a bookbuyer's eye, it's a little Heavy Metal for me.

Oh well the artist probably had no idea his painting would be used for a collection of shorts about unsettling urban decay, pasty-skinned and alienated Englishmen, and quiet, oblique madnesses that flitter at the edges of a bright noon and beyond. I read this Carroll & Graf edition from 1990 over a decade ago, trying to get back into horror fiction, but was distinctly underwhelmed and very much disappointed, as I knew I'd liked a lot of Campbell's HPL-style stories. These seemed fuzzy and unfocused and quite tepid. Honestly Demons by Daylight (along with Caitlyn Kiernan's Silk and John Shirley's Wetbones) put me off horror for many years. Fortunately, I came back to it... thanks, ironically, to his Dark Companions collection.

Original Arkham House hardcover

The October Country by Ray Bradbury (1955): The Season in My Veins

That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts...

There's not much of an autumn here in the American South where I live. We get some chilly mornings and chilly nights, but they're more like winter cold, and at mid-afternoon the sun's glare can make you think it's mid-July and Halloween is a cruel lie. There's little of the crisp smoky coolness that signals the year's end, nothing in the weather here around October that makes me think back on past autumns... and isn't autumn the most nostalgic, the most contemplative of seasons? I believe it is.

I miss autumn, a real autumn, so: to what could I turn to give myself a feeling of the season's changing? What could provide the scent of burning leaves, apple cider, pumpkin spice, the early darks and the bonewhite moons, the chilled air that nuzzles your neck, the growing thrill of the arrival of All Hallow's Eve and the macabre treats upon which to feast...? You guessed it: this collection of poisoned confections entitled The October Country, from the incomparable Ray Bradbury (although it's certainly not the first time I've turned to Ray this time of year).

A quick history: in 1947, the esteemed Arkham House published Dark Carnival, Bradbury's debut book, consisting mainly of his stories written for the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales. In 1955 Ballantine Books reprinted the collection, subtracting some of the stories and adding a few others, under the title The October Country. So basically what you have here are Bradbury's earliest works. Does that mean that they're unformed, not quite ready for consumption, perhaps timid things unsure of their footing before Bradbury gained confidence and experience as a writer? Oh, not at all! These stories are amazing. Why, I kept saying to myself as I read, am I only reading this now?

Original paperback cover art (illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini)

The longest story included, "The Next in Line" is one of the best I've read in ages; in it I could sense the seeds of Matheson, Beaumont, King, Campbell, Etchison, others who would come along in the future to join Bradbury in delighting readers with dread. A young couple vacationing in Mexico visit the mummies in the catacombs and learn how the poor bury their dead. Marie, the wife, is struck dumb and cold by the dried-husk bodies:

Jaws down, tongues out like jeering children, eyes pale brown-irised in upclenched sockets. Hairs, waxed and prickled by sunlight, each sharps as quills embedded on the lips, the cheeks, the eyelids, the brows. Little beards on chins and bosoms and loins. Flesh like drumheads and manuscripts and crisp bread dough. The women, huge ill-shaped tallow things, death-melted. The insane hair of them, like nests made and remade...

And much more like that throughout. Yep, Bradbury's unmistakeable style was there from the beginning. Many of you have probably come across "The Small Assassin" somewhere or other; it's been anthologized plenty. Its ingeniousness wins out over its central implausibility because it sounds true: What is there in the world more selfish than a baby? Guess there's one sure way to cure post-partum depression.

Some stories have such plain titles the words themselves take on a simple malevolence: "The Jar" (obviously the basis for the cover art at the top). "The Lake." "The Emissary." "Skeleton." "The Crowd." "The Wind." As someone who finds blowing winds anxiety-inducing, I could really relate to that last one. There's a vaguely Lovecraftian or Algernon Blackwood feel: That's what the wind is. It's a lot of people dead. The wind killed them, took their minds to give itself intelligence. It took all their voices and made them into one voice...

Death appears in myriad forms: on an endless field of wheat, at 92 degrees Fahrenheit on the thermometer, in the very bones in our bodies, down in the earth itself. "The Emissary" starts off innocently autumnal with a sick boy in bed who lives vicariously through his roaming pet dog; it finishes not so innocently at all. Bradbury perennials like sideshows and carnivals feature in "The Dwarf" and "The Jar," and his sense of boundless, mischievous joy buoys "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" and "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone." There is sadness too: Timothy, the young boy in "Homecoming," yearns and yearns for a monstrous familial identity that will never be his, while "Uncle Einar" wishes he could be a normal father for his brood.

Poised between the sweet and the scary, I see The October Country as a beginner's book of horror; something to be given out like candy to eager children, to satisfy a sweet tooth, to prime burgeoning taste buds for a lifetime of fearsome entertainments. The marvelous Bradbury prose is appropriate for younger readers while offering us adults plenty to appreciate and exclaim over; poetic and playful, with rich veins of darkness powering through, as in "Touched with Fire"...

Some people are not only accident-prones, which means they want to punish themselves physically... but their subconscious puts them in dangerous situations... They're potential victims. It is marked on their faces, hidden like - like tattoos... these people, these death-prones, touch all the wrong nerves in passing strangers; they brush the murder in all our breasts.

(And I haven't even mentioned the stark black-and-white illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini; be sure to go here to see them all. *shiver*.)

It's no surprise to state, finally, that The October Country is a horror classic for all ages for all the ages, one that I wish I had read years ago; it is a must-read, a must-have, preferably in one of these musty old paperback editions, creased and worn from years of seasonal readings, of visits again and again to a country where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.

Thinking only autumn thoughts.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vols. I and II, ed. by August Derleth (1969): Just Another Dream of Death

Actually it's been some decades since I read these classic Lovecraft-inspired anthologies, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and over the years have sadly lost my copies. Weird, surrealistic images on these, bespeaking of the general madness, terror, and disorientation of a reality that should not be. The first volume includes Mythos tales by the mighty likes of HPL himself, Conan creator Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, J. Vernon Shea, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and editor Derleth. The second has more Lovecraft and Bloch, Brian Lumley, Colin Wilson, and Ramsey Campbell. I daresay you cannot go wrong with either volume, although I remember the stories do vary in quality. However, in Derleth's intro, he states "It is undeniably evident that there exists in Lovecraft's concept a basic similarity to the Christian Mythos, specifically in regard to the expulsion of Satan from Eden and the power of evil." Yeahhhh... no.

These first two paperbacks, from Beagle Books, May and June 1971 respectively, are adorned by Victor Valla's insanity-inducing cover art. Below you see the Ballantine Books reprints from 1973, with covers whose art I've never totally understood or liked (neither does this fellow), from John Holmes. There was a Del Rey reprint of both volumes in one in 1998. But you can find these old editions used on eBay and Amazon and elsewhere, usually around $10 to $15. It's worth it, for these are the kinds of old paperbacks that exude that inimitable old-book smell, one of dust and mold, of dreaming death and deathlessness, where one dwells amidst the wonder and glory of the Old Ones forever...

original Arkham House hardcover, 1969

August Derleth 1909 - 1971

The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long (1946): Hunt You to the Ground They Will

While countless horror writers have contributed works to Lovecraft's immortal Cthulhu mythos, it is Frank Belknap Long (pic below) who was the very first to write such a story after encouragement from Lovecraft himself. One of Lovecraft's close friends and correspondents, Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos" first appeared in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. These nightmarish creatures became part of Lovecraftian mythology and were used by other writers in the field such as Ramsey Campbell.


I first read the story in high school, thanks to a beat-up paperback of August Derleth's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 1, furtively passed to me during some droning lecture or another in the auditorium. With other works by Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, J. Vernon Shea, Derleth himself, etc., it was a good intro to the Lovecraft circle. But it was always Long's tale that somehow stuck with me; read, if I recall correctly, in high-school detention hall (did a lot of horror-fiction reading there, which was actually the cafeteria).

Original Arkham House hardcover, 1946

"The Hounds of Tindalos" themselves are extra-dimensional entities who move slowly through outrageous angles of space/time - not the curves - and seek to consume men who, like Chalmers, the rebel "scientist" whose misadventure the narrator relates, discover the abyss before life itself. Aided by a drug he claims was used by Lao-Tse to discover the Tao, Chalmers finds his way to this fourth dimension and is terrified by these "hounds," whom he describes thusly:

All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies... They scented me. Men awake in them cosmic hungers... But they are not evil in our sense because in the spheres through which they move there is no thought, no moral, no right or wrong as we understand it... There is merely the pure and the foul. The foul expresses itself through angles; the pure through curves.

And chaos ensues as Chalmers vows to return and then meets either the hounds again or the Doels - I have no idea who they are, Long simply inserts a reference to them. Are they the Lovecraftian dholes? Perhaps. As in the other stories here, Long also invokes ancient Greek myths, but it's been awhile since I've dipped into Hamilton's Mythology, so I was glad for the refreshers he provides. Chalmers' final writings include a hilarious "ahhh" as if he were transcribing his own screams! Oh, Lovecraftian cliches, how we love them so...

Belmont Books, 1963 (contains only 9 stories from original hardcover)

I picked up this science-fictiony style collection in a great used bookstore in Hollywood; it doesn't even list Long's name on the spine, as it only reads The Hounds of Tindalos: "Science Fiction Masterwork." I have never seen anything like that on any other book. Personally I really dislike this cover; there are no astronauts in this collection, one-eyed or not. Just seems like some artwork the publisher had lying around the office, just waiting to be used. It contains about half of the stories from the original 1946 Arkham House hardcover; from Jove in 1978 came its second paperback reprint as part of the "early Long" series, which included some perfectly grotesque cover art by Rowena Morrill (see top). Publication history gets confusing but I believe the other half was republished in paperback form in The Dark Beasts, which has a cool Edward Gorey cover.

As for the other short stories herein, I must say nothing really jumped out at me as much of anything special; a lot of standard-issue pulp product, decently written but certainly not deathless. "The Space-Eaters" is somewhat atmospheric and has a character who is obviously Lovecraft himself, but it seems to be part of that "Christianizing" of the mythos, reducing the drama to simplistic good vs. evil battles - despite Long considering himself an agnostic and sharing Lovecraft's skepticism of religious claims. "Dark Vision," has a young man who can read the thoughts of others, finding minds are cesspools of maggoty hate and carnality and revolting spite. In "Fisherman's Luck" a Greek god with a love of pranks returns; "The Black Druid" concerns an evil overcoat. Weird Tales completists will probably enjoy these stories the most.

Despite nearly 70 years as a prolific author, Long died in abject poverty in 1994.

The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson (1967): The Villain with a Thousand Faces

The British writer Colin Wilson published his best-selling first book, The Outsider, when he was just 24. A work of existential philosophy about the role of the misfit artist in the modern world, it seems not far removed from the concerns of some of Lovecraft's stories, particularly the one with the same title. In his preface to The Mind Parasites, Wilson talks about his first experience reading Lovecraft and how much it affected him, obsessing not only over the fiction but also Lovecraft's life. He states he intended this novel to be a tongue in cheek and affectionate tribute to the Providence gentleman but I don't, however, think that Wilson knows just what "tongue in cheek" and "affectionate" mean: a more dour and self-serious piece of fiction I have not read for this blog!

A handsome lad he was: Wilson in 1956, not looking so serious

At first I was intrigued as the story built up slowly, with all the kinds of faux-scholarship that one finds in Lovecraftian fiction. The unexpected suicide of the narrator's old colleague sets everything off, of course. This narrator, archaeologist Gilbert Austin, then discovers mysterious remains of a huge, heretofore unknown civilization two miles beneath the surface of the earth; yes, it seems Lovecraft's tales were based on fact, "discovered" by the "racial consciousness" of which Carl Jung wrote. This leads Austin and a fellow investigator to suspect the existence of a malevolent race of entities who seek to undermine man's free will and natural "evolution." But as the philosophical concerns began to make themselves more and more present and long-winded, I was distracted by Wilson's know-it-all superior tone. Much of Mind Parasites is a pompous bore, stuffy and fairly pretentious; a stereotype of the intellectual Englishman enamored of his own thought processes and insights.

Arkham House first edition, 1967

Austin - an obvious stand-in for the Wilson himself, if one looks at Wilson's other writings - is nearly obsessed with those "superhuman geniuses" that have blessed mankind with their existence: fuddy-duddy cultural folks like Goethe, Mozart, Nietzsche, Shaw, Wordsworth, and other musty white dudes (always white, always dudes) from the dark ages who the narrator sees as life-affirming artistic forces. But sometime after the 1800s these parasites gained control of men's minds and forced on them triviality and boredom and submission to base appetites, producing folks like de Sade and Hitler as well as making the average person a total loser too.

The parasites of the title are an ancient vampiric alien race, the Tsathogguans, who reside not in the depths of the sea or on the plains of Leng but in our very minds, feeding on us as a cancer and bending human history to their will. As a metaphor for the neuroses and fears that prevent humanity from living up to its own potential - or at least certain individuals from doing so - it isn't bad; it is just too obvious that Wilson has made Lovecraftian lore a vehicle for his own intellectual pet projects. This gets tiresome fast, and there is no irony or charm here to mitigate this high-mindedness:

The sheer size of the task overawed us. Yet it did not depress us. No scientist could be depressed at the prospect of endless discovery... we found ourselves looking at the people around us with a kind of god-like pity. They were all so preoccupied with their petty worries, all enmeshed in their personal little daydreams, while we at last were grappling with reality - the one true reality, that of the evolution of the mind.

Late '60s UK edition

This my be overly critical but I also found Wilson lacking in imagination in the science-fiction department: in his future world of the early 2000s (!) he imagines still playing records on gramophones, calling the British Museum itself to look up simple facts about a previously unfamiliar American writer named Lovecraft, and reading the evening paper. Yeah, I know, that's not really Wilson's job here to completely re-imagine the future like a Clarke or a Gibson but I certainly found it off-putting and dated. Writing a Lovecraftian tale was not something Wilson had even entertained until August Derleth himself suggested it in their correspondence.

If you know anything about the literary avant garde of the 1960s you might find Mind Parasites to your liking; the (half-baked?) ideas of Aldous Huxley, Wilhelm Reich, William Burroughs, and other like-minded writers are referenced, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely (surely the author described as having "a high reputation among the avant garde for his curious blend of sadomasochism, science fiction, and world-weary pessimism" could be none other than Burroughs). The whole concept of psychedelic drugs and mind expansion plays a part in the novel, which interested me for about 10 minutes when I was 20 but I admit no specific concern in that area today. Throw in psychokinesis, or "PK energy," and I'm tuning right out.

Oneiric Press edition, 1972

Yes, all this is pretty heady stuff for a simple horror fiction read; its impetus may have been Lovecraft but the style reminds me more of H.G. Wells, while the appropriately "cyclopean" cover art (Bantam 1968), despite the spaceman, appealed to my love of vintage SF imagery. Less a straight horror novel than science fiction philosophy of an immature and cranky sort, its relationship to the Cthulhu mythos might make The Mind Parasites of some interest to completist Lovecraft fans, but the general horror reader can probably pass.

Robert Bloch: The Paperback Covers of the AUTHOR OF PSYCHO!!!

No reader of horror fiction needs an introduction to Robert Bloch. Once asked how he had the energy to be such an endlessly prolific writer, Bloch replied, "I have the heart of a small boy... in a jar on my desk." A groan-inducing pun? Yes, but that type of macabre, old-man humor is one of Bloch's trademarks. Since his teenage days in the 1930s as a personal correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft's, Bloch's countless novels and story collections have mined black humor and pathological criminal behavior. His works have been printed and reprinted for decades by various publishers with all different styles of cover art, but one thing was virtually a constant after a certain 1960 movie: the phrase "author of Psycho" beneath his name.

Early works like the crime novel The Scarf (1947), or The Opener of the Way (1945) originally from Arkham House, have it on their later mass market paperback resissues. And it's really no surprise, is it? Bloch had ostensibly created (with a filmmaker's assist, of course) the most iconic murder in all of horror - and crime - fiction. Publishers were not about to let reading audiences forget that.

A UK edition of Opener of the Way (1976), as well as Mysteries of the Worm (1981), collect Bloch's Weird Tales/Cthulhu Mythos stories of the 1930s, which he admits were maybe just a little too amateurishly Lovecraftian to be of much interest years later.

The Dead Beat (1960) and Firebug (1961) are suspense pulps with the appropriate cover art. Dig how the match flame is burning up Psycho...

Pleasant Dreams (1960/1979), Nightmares (1961), Strange Eons (1978), and The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (1963) collect Bloch's short stories. Yes, that's Peter Cushing examining the Marquis skull in the 1965 movie The Skull.

Terror (1962) and Horror-7 (1963) don't really go out of their way in the title department but know that a terrified woman is simply irresistible to horror fiction readers. Or at least a woman who seems slightly perplexed and pissed by her situation.

Novels like Night World (1972) and The Cunning (originally published as There is a Serpent in Eden in 1979 with a completely incongruous cover) followed. By the 1980s Bloch was being published by the Tor horror line, who even went way back to 1954 with its reprint of The Kidnapper. "Better than Psycho!" it exclaims. One seriously doubts that claim. The Night of the Ripper (1984) and Lori (1989) look like any other mass market horror paperback of the era; the latter title part of Bloch's boundless fascination with Jack the Ripper, whom he first wrote about in his classic short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" way back in '43. I read it way back in '89 or so and yet remember nothing about it.

By the time of his death at age 77 in 1994, Robert Bloch was, of course, considered a grand master of genre fiction. One wonders just what became of that small boy's heart in a jar on his desk...

The Weird Tales of Clark Ashton Smith: Nightmares Forever Calling Me

Unless you are diehard fan of horror or dark fantasy stories of the early 20th century, the name Clark Ashton Smith probably means little or nothing to you. But for those of us who are such fans, his name conjures up worlds of exotic darkness, of the purplest prose describing the strangest entities of eons past. Along with Lovecraft and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, Smith ruled those long-ago days of the 1930s and Weird Tales magazine. But unlike the other two, whose works have long been readily available, Smith sank, along with most of their Weird Tales brethren, into obscurity. Despite vocal champions like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Lovecraft himself, Smith is a household name only to those folks, like myself, whose homes suffer under a surfeit of paperback horror fiction. And not even always then.

Fortunately in recent years much of his work has come back into print thanks to, you guessed it, the rise of the internet. A Google search turns up plenty on him. But, as always here at Too Much Horror Fiction, what is the fun of simply ordering a $20 book off Amazon? The real collecting fun is had scouring bookstores and library sales and even eBay to find these gloriously-covered and colored paperbacks which smell of dust and bear the worn creases of hours of much-loved reading. I've luckily found all of these paperback editions over the years; they're treasured parts of my collection, you can be sure. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy editions from the early 1970s are particularly awesome.

For me, Smith conjures up memories of hours lost in musty crooked bookstores, trying to find any of his elusive paperbacks published throughout the 1970s by Ballantine. In the 1930s and '40s much of his output was published in small hardcover editions by Arkham House and these are now collectors' items. For those not so inclined at collecting there is The Eldritch Dark site, devoted to everything Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft dubbed him). You'll miss out on some distinctive cover art, replete with demonic sorcerers, underground caverns, and bizarre nightlife, however.

A poet and a sculptor in addition to being an author, Smith published dozens of stories throughout the 1930s with delightfully odd and evocative titles like "The Charnel God," "The Dark Eidolon," "The Beast of Averoigne," "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," "The Desolation of Soom" and "The Isle of the Torturers." I mean, awesome! Smith invented prehistoric, arctic lands like Hyperborea, or Averoigne, or Zothique, peopled with primitives and shamans and wizards and priests and all manner of horrific creatures. With a prose style charmingly antiquated, a vocabulary that would put any logophile to shame, and an imagination that knew the darkness of a hundred ancient worlds, Smith's stories embrace myth, magic, and horror with equal fervor. Any true horror fan should avail themselves of his malevolent and decadent visions at once.

Original Arkham House hardcovers, 1942 and 1944; latter features CAS's sculptures

As all men know, the advent of the Beast was coeval with the coming of that red comet which rose behind the Dragon in the early summer of 1369. Like Satan's rutilant hair, trailing on the wind of Gehenna as he hastens worldward, the comet streamed nightly above Avergoigne, bringing the fear of bale and pestilence in its train. And soon the rumor of a strange evil, a foulness unheard of in any legend, passed among the people...