Anon – Black Tales
Posted by demonik on August 31, 2007
Black Tales – ( Corgi 1965)
Matthew Gregory Lewis – Mistrust
Ambrose Bierce – The Middle Toe Of The Right Foot
Robert Louis Stevenson – Markheim
Edgar Allan Poe – Hop-Frog
Nathaniel Hawthorne – Rappaccini’s Daughter
Richard Middleton – The Ghost Ship
It could be that these stories were hard to come by in 1965, or they’d just dropped out of copyright. As it is, while there’s nothing remotely second rate in here, only ‘Monk’ Lewis’s story is unfamiliar and if you’ve ten ghost story anthologies, chances are you’ll already have copies of the rest. Hop-frog is Poe at his most playful and the grisly climax is possibly an early influence on E. C. Bierce is represented by one of his grimmest (and funniest) ghost stories, and Lewis’s slab of gothic melodrama is welcome, if comparatively minor.
Vault Of Evil 
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