Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Sandy Ferber


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House of the Restless Dead and Other Stories: Spelunking

House of the Restless Dead and Other Stories by Hugh B. Cave

In my ongoing quest to read every one of the selections spotlighted in Jones & Newman’s excellent overview volume Horror: 100 Best Books, I have come to the realization that some of those books are a lot harder to obtain than others. Oh, sure, with the search tools available on the Interwebs, pretty much any title is easy to find today, but getting it at a decent price … ah, that can be more problematic.


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Mistress of Terror and Other Stories: Alabama getaway

Mistress of Terror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

By the time a reader gets to the fourth and final volume in Ramble House’s series of books dedicated to Wyatt Blassingame, he/she will almost inevitably have come to the realization that the Alabama-born author surely was a master of that peculiar horror subgenre known as “weird-menace” fiction. And indeed, those first three volumes – The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One,


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The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories: Sweet Home Alabama?

The Unholy Goddess and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

It would be hard to imagine anyone who experiences the first two Ramble House collections dedicated to the Alabama-born author Wyatt Blassingame – namely, The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One and Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume Two – not being hugely impressed and wanting to read more.


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Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories: Lepers and swamp men and ghosts, oh, my!

Lady of the Yellow Death and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

I can’t imagine any reader who, having turned over the final page of the 2010 Ramble House offering entitled The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume One, was not compelled to proceed on to Volume Two. That first volume had given us seven tales concerning inbred and homicidal swamp-dwelling junkies, a tongue-slashing serial killer, a swamp-dwelling spider woman, the vengeful ghost of a British seaman, a white slavery racket,


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The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: Seven tales from a Weird-Menace pro

The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories by Wyatt Blassingame

A little while back, I was very pleased to read my first collection in the genre known as “weird-menace” fiction, which genre mainly dealt, back in the 1930s and early ‘40s, with lurid, violent, supernatural stories that usually turned out to have rather mundane – and often far-fetched – explanations. That collection was Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields, a 2014 release from the publisher Ramble House. I enjoyed my first weird-menace exposure so well that I determined to seek out some similar fare from Ramble House’s immense catalog,


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Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories: Ten Exemplars of the Weird-Menace Genre

Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields

Gathering together 10 remarkably grisly tales from the pages of three of the most lurid of the pulp magazines, Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories is the first collection of Ralston Shields’ work ever assembled. Released in 2014 by the Dancing Tuatara Press imprint of Ramble House, the book shines a long-overdue spotlight on an author whom John Pelan, in his introduction, calls the greatest writer of “weird-menace” fiction on a story-by-story basis.


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Echo of a Curse: “A very long and very strange story”

Echo of a Curse by R.R. Ryan

In several of my earlier musings here on FanLit, I made reference to the list that editor/author Karl Edward Wagner released in the pages of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine back in the summer of ’83; the so-called Wagner 39 List. This overview of KEW’s favorite horror novels, and those that he felt were most in need of being brought to the public’s attention, was divided into three categories: The 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels, The 13 Best Science-Fiction Horror Novels, and The 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels.


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Six Horrors With Boris Karloff

Born in 1887 in Surrey, England, William Henry Pratt would eventually change his name to Boris Karloff and wind up becoming one of the most important figures that the world of horror cinema has ever known. Although he had been in films since as early as 1919, it wasn’t until his legendary turn as the Frankenstein monster in the classic Universal film of 1931 that Karloff’s career really got off the ground. Between then and the end of his career, in 1968, Karloff appeared in hundreds of films, both on the big screen and on television, around 60 of which served to cement his reputation as one of horror’s all-time greats.


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Six Wonderful Eurohorrors

During the course of my horror-movie musings here on FanLit, this film buff has written many reviews of scary pictures that were the products of Britain and Italy. And indeed, what with Hammer Studios in the former and the dozens of giallo films issuing forth from the latter, there really is a seemingly endless number of mind-blowing horror films to be had from those two countries alone. But Italy and the U.K. were surely not the only countries “across the pond” to have produced wonderful horror fare, and in today’s Shocktober column, I would like to shine a light on some other European countries that have given the world some shocking cinematic experiences.


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A Sextet of Horrors From the 1940s

As I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, the history of the 1940s horror film can practically be summarized in two words: Universal and Lewton. Over at Universal Studios, a continuing stream of pictures featuring such classic characters as Frankenstein, Dracula, the Invisible Man, and the Mummy emerged to delight and entertain war-weary audiences. Meanwhile, over at RKO, producer Val Lewton, beginning with 1942’s Cat People, would come out with a series of subtle horror films that depended more on atmosphere and mood, rather than gruesome monsters themselves, to deliver shudders. Some other Lewton horrors to emerge that decade would include the truly wonderful and artful I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and the undersung Boris Karloff outing Isle of the Dead (1945).


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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