by Mike Gray

As a follow-up to a previous post, here are several books and authors who succeeded in perpetrating terror through their stories:

(1) H. Russell Wakefield: You can buy The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield on Amazon.com, but it’s pretty pricey.

(2) “Saki,” as many of you know, was really an English writer named H. H. Munro. He specialized in twisty stories. You can get Penguin’s The Complete Saki at a good discount on Amazon.com.

(3) You can buy Perceval Landon’s “Thurnley Abbey” in a Kindle Edition on Amazon.com.

(4) Ghost stories by Cynthia Asquith have been collected as The Ghost Book: Sixteen Stories of the Uncanny and is available on Amazon.com.

(5) William Hope Hodgson was a prolific “horror” writer who produced some classics in the genre, including The House on the Borderland and The Night Land. Adrift on the Haunted Seas collects many of the stories and poems Hodgson wrote about the mysteries of the sea.

(6) August Derleth is best known as the creator of Solar Pons, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, as well as the person who single-handedly kept H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction before the public by founding Arkham House publishers. Eight volumes of his short fiction were collected; one is Dwellers in Darkness.

(7) Thirty of M. R. James’s uncanny tales have been compiled as Collected Ghost Stories.

(8) We’re not sure, but we believe Margaret Irwin was a noted author of historical novels.

(9) Although we disagree with Lovecraft on one point, at least (“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind” isn’t fear but love), two fine anthologies of short terror tales compiled from his survey of supernatural fiction (Supernatural Horror in Literature) are H. P. Lovecrafts’s Book of the Supernatural and H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror.