Monsters, Monsters, Monsters

by Helen Hoke (Editor)

Thirteen stories of horror and the supernatural by well-known American and British authors. A monstrous mantle of grey-black slime with an insatiable appetite; a gigantic hairless caterpillar exuding an odor of corruption and decay; a purple patch of vapor with a white projection like a vultures beak; a hideous creature with a neck seventy feet long and a deaths-head on its breast these are just some of the horrors gathered together in this monster anthology.

Vampires, Werewolves, Glantokians, the Big Colugo, a mechanical murdering monster, and the ghastly Outsider from whom everyone flees in terror make up this galaxy of horrors.

Many well-known masters of the horror story and the supernatural are represented here:

Table of contents:
Slime - Brennan, J. P.
The foghorn - Bradbury, R.
Impulse - Russell, E. F.
Negotium perambulans - Benson, E. F.
The monster of Cakaudrove - Reed, A. W. and Hames, I.
The sphinx - Poe, E. A.
The vampires of Tempassuk - Rutter, O.
In the Avu observatory - Wells, H. G.
The water monster - Hope-Simpson, J.
The horror of the heights - Doyle, A. C.
Gabriel-Ernest - Saki.
Moxon's master - Bierce. A.
The outsider - Lovecraft. H.P.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction

187 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Helen Jeanne Lamb Hoke (20 July 1903 - 26 March 1990) was an American author of children's books.

She wrote nearly 100 children's books and set up and ran children's book divisions in five publishing companies. Helen Hoke was well known for her anthologies on children’s humour, but she was also fascinated by the esoteric, the supernatural, and the weird.

In 1945, Hoke married Franklin M. Watts, who owned Franklin M. Watts, Inc., publishers, and became the vice-president and director of international projects.

Franklin Hoke is her grandson.

Reviews

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Hoke's "Terrific Triple Titles" is a beautifully subversive series of anthologies, introducing kids and teens to the great horror writers of the pulp and Playboy eras without censorship and with deliciously eerie impressionistic illustrations. My elementary and middle school library stocked a bunch of these (which it obviously had never read for content checks). These were my introduction to serious "adult" horror, and I loved them. This book is one of the lesser titles, but it still contains great tales by Lovecraft, Benson and Bradbury, essential to my teenage years.

[robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this a higher rating than I would have, on looking at the other reviews. This is obviously a book that people loved as children, and it's not fair to rate low because it doesn't appeal to a wider-read adult.

Coming at this from an adult perspective, this isn't a great collection; of the monsters collected here, some are wearied by constant exposure - I read The Foghorn in multiple places, back when Bradbury was still printed everywhere - and some of the more classical freaks just aren't frightening.

I bought this book for Charles Keeping's illustrations. He was a marvelous, unique illustrator, and this book is a fair example of his work. If your taste is for the macabre, he did illustrations also for books called Classic Ghost Stories, Classic Tales of the Macabre, Frankenstein, and a wonderful Beowulf.

As a kid though, my favorites of his were the Rosemary Sutcliff and the Nicholas Stuart Gray books. At his best he's amazing and even his least beautiful work draws the eye.

[Grayson Hooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember pulling this book from the shelves of my grade school library in 1990. What a gateway!

[Kurt Dahlke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked this book out from the library frequently as a kid. Kids don't have it nearly this good these days. The illustrations by Keeping are fantastic.

[G.R. Yeates · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first exposure to horror. Without this tome, I would not have discovered Lovecraft. The rating for this is therefore incredibly biased on my part but I still recommend it as a great and varied anthology. Tales of note apart from The Outsider being Ray Bradbury's The Foghorn, the opening tale, Slime, J.P. Brennan's Slime and Conan Doyle's Horror of the Heights. The monsters here tend towards being of a more speculative and sometimes sympathetic nature than traditional horror frights, which is why I think this volume made such an initial impression on me.