Super creepy collection of [a:Hugh B. Cave|8637|Hugh B. Cave|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1288993349p2/8637.jpg]'s best horror stuff. Certainly the best collection of Cave I have ever seen, hardly a clinker in the batch. On the more grue side of the pulp era and not as polished as other pulp writers but this is made up for in the creepiness and excitement of these stories. Excellent gruesome illustrations by Lee Brown Coye just improves the look and feel of the stories. Really a beautiful edition.

Carcosa Press only released 4 books in it's short lifetime, this was the first. Hard to find in first edition but fortunately reprinted in a trade edition (I think it is the only Carcosa title ever reprinted). Not sure if the reprint includes the original illustrations, but still worth picking up even without these.

I tended to rate books too high in the past but this is a definite five stars even on reappraisal. ( )

I would say that Hugh B. Cave was not a great innovator, but a solid and capable writer in the terse pulp fiction style. His fiction consists of vampires, voluptuous women, men of action, and the mad. His writing reminds one of pulp era tales of the criminal underworld, with quick paced action, smoking revolvers, and fists connecting squarely with jaws, but his antagonists tend to the supernatural and science fictional rather than your run-of-the-mill gangsters and gun molls. All in all an enjoyable collection of pulp horror tales. ( )

Pulpy horror fiction at its best! I found a reference to this author when I was researching short stories related to the Cthulhu mythos, so I bought the book to add to my collection. At 475 pages, this book is filled with 26 very bizarre pulp horror stories by the late author Hugh B. Cave. The editor, Karl Wagner, contacted Cave about putting together some of his best work in one volume, as it had been spread about in various publications a la Weird Tales, beginning in the 1930s. As with any anthology, there are some that are great and some not so hot, but overall, it was a very very fun and entertaining read.

There are 2 stories featuring Nyarlathotep for you Mythos fans out there: "The Isle of Dark Magic," and "The Death Watch."

A word of warning: many of these stories were written at a time when racial stereotyping (vernacular, jargon, profiling) was not negatively viewed as it is today, so it is a bit racist in today's thinking.

I would definitely recommend it to aficionados of the pulp genre (I'm fast becoming one myself), to horror readers who want something completely different, and of course, the two Mythos-related stories to Mythos readers. ( )