What Started It All

My love for the macabre and the numinous was inspired by a number of books, movies, and television shows from my youth. Seeing Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), my first film in a movie theater, when I was six years old and watching the famous Jonny Quest TV series when I was nine had a significant impact on my life and inspired my obsession with genre art. Yet, the greatest impact came when I was fourteen years old when I discovered an anthology in my junior high school library.

Great Tales Of Terror and the Supernatural was an anthology of 52 classic tales of horror and dark fantasy edited by Herbert Alvin Wise (1863-1961): a Wall Street broker and patron of the arts, and Phyllis Cerf Wagner (1916-2006): a writer, actress, and socialite. 

First published in 1944, when I signed the anthology out of the library in 1969, I had little knowledge of the impact the collection would have on my life, especially the two tales that came at the end of the book.

Out of all the classics available to my fingertips, The Rats in the Walls and The Dunwich Horror, by H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) were the ones that set my imagination on fire. In fact, of all the stories in the book, it was the latter that truly frightened me as I read of Dr. Henry Armitage desperately trying to stop a colossal, invisible monstrosity as it ravaged the backwoods of Massachusetts. I actually had nightmares.

Since then I have read everything the Old Gentleman From Providence has written as well as made two pilgrimages to his grave at Swan Point Cemetery. Since then I have crafted my own tales of terror, but none have ever come to the quality and impact of Lovecraft’s imagination. Nonetheless, if I ever become famous for my writings, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants who have come before me.

Here is a list of the 52 stories present in the collection. The entire book is a free and legal download available at this link.

1. La Grande Bretêche, by Honoré de Balzac (trans. of La Grande Bretèche 1832)
2. The Black Cat (1843), by Edgar Allan Poe
3. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), by Edgar Allan Poe
4. A Terribly Strange Bed (1852), by Wilkie Collins
5. The Boarded Window (1889), by Ambrose Bierce
6. The Three Strangers (1883), by Thomas Hardy
7. The Interruption (1925), by W. W. Jacobs
8. Pollock and the Porroh Man (1895), by H. G. Wells
9. The Sea Raiders (1896), by H. G. Wells 
10. Sredni Vashtar (1910), by Saki
11. Moonlight Sonata (1931), by Alexander Woollcott
12. Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1932), by Conrad Aiken
13. Suspicion (1933), by Dorothy L. Sayers
14. The Most Dangerous Game (1924), by Richard Edward Connell [as by Richard Connell]
15. Leiningen Versus the Ants (1938), by Carl Stephenson (trans. of Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen 1937)
16. The Gentleman from America (1924), by Michael Arlen
17. A Rose for Emily (1930), by William Faulkner
18. The Killers (1927), by Ernest Hemingway
19. Back for Christmas (1939), by John Collier
20. Taboo (1939), by Geoffrey Household
21. The Haunters and the Haunted: or, The House and the Brain (1859), by Edward Bulwer-Lytton 
22. Rappaccini's Daughter (1844), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
23. The Trial for Murder (1865), by Charles Dickens (a variant of To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt)
24. Green Tea (1869), by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
25. What Was It? (1859), by Fitz-James O'Brien
26. Sir Edmund Orme (1891), by Henry James
27. The Horla, or Modern Ghosts (1910), by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Le Horla 1887)
28. Was It a Dream? (1903), by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of La Morte 1887)
29. The Screaming Skull (1908), by F. Marion Crawford
30. The Furnished Room (1904), by O. Henry
31. Casting the Runes (1911), by M. R. James
32. Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad (1904), by M. R. James
33. Afterward (1910), by Edith Wharton
34. The Monkey's Paw (1902), by W. W. Jacobs
35. The Great God Pan (1894), by Arthur Machen
36. How Love Came to Professor Guildea (1897), by Robert Hichens
37. The Return of Imray (1891), by Rudyard Kipling (variant of The Recrudescence of Imray)
38. "They" (1904), by Rudyard Kipling
39. Lukundoo (1907), by Edward Lucas White
40. Caterpillars (1912), by E. F. Benson
41. Mrs. Amworth (1922), by E. F. Benson
42. Ancient Sorceries (1908), by Algernon Blackwood
43. Confession (1921), by Algernon Blackwood and Wilfred Wilson
44. The Open Window (1911), by Saki
45. The Beckoning Fair One (1911), by Oliver Onions
46. Out of the Deep (1923), by Walter de la Mare
47. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), by A. E. Coppard
48. The Celestial Omnibus (1908), by E. M. Forster
49. The Ghost Ship (1912), by Richard Middleton 
50. The Sailor-Boy's Tale (1942), by Karen Blixen aka Isak Dinesen
51. The Rats in the Walls (1924), by H. P. Lovecraft
52. The Dunwich Horror (1929), by H. P. Lovecraft