Whistling past the yawning graveyard...

Boo again! I'm still in that Halloween mood, even though it's early in the month. You can see the kiddies in the schools are already excited. The stores put out the sacks of trick or treat candy early, the moms buy some…the kids eat them…the sugar makes them high. We have a bunch of sugar junkies leaping up and down in the classrooms. Solution: put Ritalin in the school's water fountains.

Anyway, with the exception of the last one, this is a nice little collection of horror anthology paperbacks from the UK. I bought them in Petaluma, California, where a guy was selling them in his antiques kiosk for $1.00 apiece.

Besides being a fine writer, August Derleth was also a publisher. His imprint, Arkham House, anthologized many of the great Weird Tales writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, etc.

Dashiell Hammett is most famous for his detective stories, but lending his name to a horror anthology probably helped sales.

I threw in the Pan Book because until I saw the Gold Medal logo and 50¢ price I thought it was from the UK. Well, scare me with a screaming skull if that don't beat all! Nice cover, though.