I own the 1975 Manor Books reissue. Last I checked 1975 was more than 50 years ago (I’m no good at math but I feel confident in this claim). That makes it old… and the stories it contains, even older. The first two were first printed in 1908 and 1910, respectively. Nothing newer than 1956 vintage, now 70 years in the past.
But old is often good, time-tested and true. And this is the time for horror. It’s October and the veil between our world and the spiritual realm, thinned. So, on to the contents.
• “Ancient Sorceries,” Algernon Blackwood
• “The Gateway of the Monster,” William Hope Hodgson
• "The Unnamable" by H. P. Lovecraft
• “The Thing on the Roof,” Robert E. Howard
• "Mr. Ames' Devil,” August Derleth
• "In the X-Ray,” Fritz Leiber
• "One Foot and the Grave,” Theodore Sturgeon
• "I Kiss Your Shadow,” Robert Bloch
Despite the lineup of heavy-hitters I found Horror Hunters a bit more mixed than I hoped. But overall it’s a solid little volume. I love the cover, even if the leering skull seems to portend flesh-eating zombies and a bit more mayhem than we get. Horror Hunters is the stuff of chills and atmosphere, less so murder or gore.
Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” sets a sedate tone. It’s a very slow burn … that eventually catches fire. I liked once it got going. The story is about a timid, highly sensitive and conservative Englishman traveling in the Alps and wanders into a town of secretive lycanthropic cat-people. It turns his worldview upside down. It’s really about the fear of losing oneself, our helplessness when confronted with our primitive lusts. The narrator experiences equal measures of self-loathing and shame, and the release of taboo and sexual abandon that accompanies the dropping of his stifling civilized veneer.
Blackwood wrote a series of stories about a paranormal investigator named John Silence and this is one of them. These were all collected at one point and I probably need to pick them up.
William Hope Hodgson’s “The Gateway of the Monster” was OK, a classic haunted house/haunted room story. Bumps in the night, restless spirits etc. Not a whole lot else to say.
Lovecraft’s story was the one that grabbed me most of all the stories in the volume. I’d read “The Unnamable” before, perhaps a couple times, but it was nice to revisit the moldering old graveyard in Arkham.
I say revisit not merely because it was a re-read but I’ve also visited the dilapidated 17th century burial ground in Salem/Arkham, aka., the Charter Street Cemetery, that serves as the setting of this story. I’ve seen many such houses Lovecraft describes here, low gambrel rooves nearly touching the ground in the back, and old diamond-paned windows that might have images of their long-dead former tenants burned into them. I have walked alone on the grounds of the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital before it was torn down. It is in my blood, the dark history and haunted atmosphere of old New England.
“The Unnamable” is good stuff.
The Robert E. Howard story is a workmanlike Cthulhu mythos tale… not one of Howard’s best, a bit too paint by numbers pastiche, but I did enjoy the Von Junzt Nameless Cults myth-making.
The August Derleth story was pretty lame, a ho-hum demon summoning story that read like C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters minus the philosophical insight.
Fritz Leiber’s “In the X-Ray” was excellent. Today, the ending is quite predictable (Stephen King wrote an entire novel about the concept of parasitic twin with The Dark Half), but Leiber’s execution is outstanding. A creepy and convincing depiction of simple hate, how some people are just plain bad—even one’s twin—such that even the grave can’t keep them from coming back to torment their victims.
Theodore Sturgeon invented Sturgeon’s Law, aka. 90% of everything is crap… in an ironic twist I found his story just that. So crap I did something I almost never do: I DNF-d it. It was intolerable … meandering, absent any horror or drama or compelling reason to go on. Not sure what happened here.
Fortunately the volume ends with a solid little shocker by Robert Bloch, a story of love reaching out its spectral arms from beyond the grave.
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