Horror Hunters

by Roger Elwood (Editor), Vic Ghidalia (Editor), Algernon Blackwood (Contributor)

Macabre

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Roger Elwood was an American science fiction writer and editor, perhaps best known for having edited a large number of anthologies and collections for a variety of publishers in the early 1970s. Elwood was also the founding editor of Laser Books and, in more recent years, worked in the evangelical Christian market.

Reviews

[Printable Tire]

Bought this probably when I was in college or shortly after from the bookstore that used to be in South Campus on Beacon Street - Boston Book Annex it was called, and it was my favorite because they had this long, stuffy and hot room that was full of old paperbacks that were, if I remember, 3 for $1 if they had a squiggly line on the front page, as my copy of Horror Hunters has. Now I have few outlets for such retail therapy.

(Unrelated: read the wikipedia article on Roger Elwood- sounds like kind of a dick!)

Talk about starting with a whimper! I must've fallen asleep at least six times trying to read "Ancient Sorceries" by Algernon Blackwood. It intentionally leaves its reader in a stupor, but perhaps too much of one. And it stagnates for much too long, repeating over and over again the townspeople's resemblances to cats.

"The Gateway of the Monster" by William Hope Hodgson is a straightforward "battling a poltergeist" story, but I like it because it seems like something someone would read for pointers in another horror story.

I don't know if H.P. Lovecraft is really capable of not taking himself too seriously, but he seems to in "the Unamabale," and this meta-story on the familiar tropes of his fiction was a nice surprise from him.

I had to refer back to "The Thing on the Roof" by Robert E. Howard presently because I forgot what it was about. Truth be told, it's not a bad story, but it's like Lovecraft fan fiction written by a friend of his.

I hated "Mr. Ames' Devil" by August Derleth. I'm glad these kind of snarky lazy-joke farts that pad short story collections are mostly extinct.

"In the X-Ray" by Fritz Leiber has a shock ending anyone can see a mile away but it'd make a fine Night Gallery episode.

I didn't immediately take to "One Foot in the Grave" by Theodore Sturgeon, what with its (as another reviewer mentioned here) "men's club" style and perspective, but in fact Sturgeon has a nice way with words ("she moved her mouth, chewing apparently the end of sleepiness") and he seemed to have fun writing this and it shows. This story also seemed the most original of the eight, what with its "curse of the hoof foot" and all.

Finally, "I Kiss Your Shadow" by Robert Bloch had its eerie moments, when it wasn't devolving into a Perry Mason episode.

[R.G. Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

A guilty pleasure. 10 years old, I used to cringe at these skull-laden book covers in Reads Drug Store (Elkton, MD). How this book reappeared in my life, I don't know. Most of the stories are Cthulhu Mythos BS--but surprisingly, the story by Cthuhlu originator H.P. Lovecraft is a kind of meta-mythos story in which the narrator complains about how an acquaintance chides him about writing stories that end in the "unnameable" (the story's title), which is ironically a story about the unnameable. The best/creepiest story is the last, "I Kiss Your Shadow" by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame). Much more contemporary than the other "men's club" horror tales, this story packs a hard-boiled, Mickey Spillane-esque punch.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of these kinds of books I collected originally because they had a Robert E. Howard story in, but this collection has quite a bit of other good stuff as well.