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Monster Mix
A dragon, a vampire, an abominable snowman, a sea serpent and other grotesque creatures of the imagination loom in these scarifying tales of the bizarre and unnnatural.
CONTENTS
"The Day of the Dragon" by Guy Endore
"Mrs. Amworth" by E.F. Benson
"Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent" by Stephen Vincent Benet
"Creature of the Snows" by William Sambrot
"Aepyornis Island" by H.G. Wells
"Fire in the Galley Stove" by William Outerson
"The Mannikin" by Robert Bloch
"The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood
"The Derelict" by William Hope Hodgson
"O Ugly Bird" by Manly Wade Wellman"
"Mimic" by Donald Wollheim
"The Hoard of the Gibbelins" by Lord Dunsany
"Footsteps Invisible" by Robert Arthur
CONTENTS
"The Day of the Dragon" by Guy Endore
"Mrs. Amworth" by E.F. Benson
"Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent" by Stephen Vincent Benet
"Creature of the Snows" by William Sambrot
"Aepyornis Island" by H.G. Wells
"Fire in the Galley Stove" by William Outerson
"The Mannikin" by Robert Bloch
"The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood
"The Derelict" by William Hope Hodgson
"O Ugly Bird" by Manly Wade Wellman"
"Mimic" by Donald Wollheim
"The Hoard of the Gibbelins" by Lord Dunsany
"Footsteps Invisible" by Robert Arthur
- GenresHorror
284 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1968
About the author
Robert Arthur
346 books302 followersRobert Arthur (1909-1969) was a versatile mystery writer born November 10, 1909, on Corregidor Island, where his father served as a U.S. Army officer. He is best known as the creator of The Three Investigators, a mystery book series for young people, but he began his career writing for the pulps, and later worked in both radio and television. He studied at William and Mary College for two years before earning a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Michigan. In 1931, he moved to New York City, where he wrote mysteries, fantasies, and horror stories for magazines like Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Black Mask throughout the 1930s.
Later, with David Kogan, he co-created and produced The Mysterious Traveler radio show (1944-1952), earning a 1953 Edgar Award. He and Kogan also won an Edgar, in 1950, for Murder By Experts. In 1959, Arthur relocated to Hollywood, scripting for The Twilight Zone and serving as story editor and writer for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, while ghost-editing numerous "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies for adults and children.
In 1963, Arthur settled in Cape May, New Jersey, where he created The Three Investigators series with The Secret of Terror Castle (1964). He wrote ten novels in the series before his death in Philadelphia on May 2, 1969. The 43-title series, continued after his death by writers-for-hire working for Random House, was published in over twenty-five languages and thirty countries. (Originally branded as "Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators", Random House dropped the Hitchcock name from the series after Hitchcock's death.)
In June of 2024, Hollow Tree Press reissued Robert Arthur's original ten novels as a sixtieth anniversary edition. Those editions have end notes written by his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth Arthur and Steven Bauer, and Hollow Tree Press is also publishing a twenty-six book New Three Investigators series written by Arthur and Bauer.
Later, with David Kogan, he co-created and produced The Mysterious Traveler radio show (1944-1952), earning a 1953 Edgar Award. He and Kogan also won an Edgar, in 1950, for Murder By Experts. In 1959, Arthur relocated to Hollywood, scripting for The Twilight Zone and serving as story editor and writer for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, while ghost-editing numerous "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies for adults and children.
In 1963, Arthur settled in Cape May, New Jersey, where he created The Three Investigators series with The Secret of Terror Castle (1964). He wrote ten novels in the series before his death in Philadelphia on May 2, 1969. The 43-title series, continued after his death by writers-for-hire working for Random House, was published in over twenty-five languages and thirty countries. (Originally branded as "Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators", Random House dropped the Hitchcock name from the series after Hitchcock's death.)
In June of 2024, Hollow Tree Press reissued Robert Arthur's original ten novels as a sixtieth anniversary edition. Those editions have end notes written by his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth Arthur and Steven Bauer, and Hollow Tree Press is also publishing a twenty-six book New Three Investigators series written by Arthur and Bauer.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 16, 2022
In my review of The Mammoth Book of Monsters I opined a little bit about the sub-genre of the "monster story" in horror fiction and it's structural difference to similar forms like the "ghost story". Here we get a late 60s take on the same idea as the Jones book - an anthology themed on monsters, which I'm sure was a popular sales niche for paperbacks, especially when aimed at younger readers. But as I've also said before, back then editors weren't afraid of giving teen readers adult stories to chew on and develop their literary eyeteeth (would that it were so today). I'm sure I'll pull a few more examples off the shelf for review as the years go by...
So here we have MONSTER MIX, edited by the redoubtable Robert Arthur, a hero of mine and general genre journeyman who wrote many things (some short fiction, THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER radio show, the ALFRED HITCHCOCK & THE THREE INVESTIGATORS book series of my youth) and edited many things (he was the written "voice" of Hitch when he edited the director's paperback anthology series) - and here's another one! Arthur uses the introduction to mostly bemoan the fact that "monster", at that moment in time, meant Kaiju and giant atomic insects, and while I don't share his lament, it's an understandable viewpoint from the time period and from a particular age group at that time.
And what you get here is a nice assortment of monster stories of various hues, which is interesting. A third of them I'd read before (but re-read for the review) and a third were on my "to read" list, which leaves a last third of unknown quantity. Excellent...
One example of those "different hues" is "Fire In The Galley Stove" by William Outerson. This tale acts as a roundabout "explanation" for the mystery of abandoned ships (see The Marie Celeste) and is told in a dry, workmanlike manner and barely exploits its plot details for any effect (Why is it in this collection? Well... ). Not bad for a young reader as a potential adventure story but told as a journalistic report, it also lacks the *zing* of that same adventure.
Another hue, and a bit unexpected, is "monster story as humorous political folklore" with Stephen Vincent Benét's "Daniel Webster And The Sea Serpent", a follow-up to that affable title character's run in with Old Nick. Here, the always trustworthy politician has an encounter with an amorous sea-monster named Samanthy just as he's trying to negotiate a treaty with England. There's some political digs ("Britannia rules the waves") and understatement ("it was what you might call kind of an impressive sight") and overall it's a cute slice of odd, whimsical fantasy.
E.F. Benson gives us our vampire story, with the classic "Mrs. Amworth" (previously read, but which went up a notch in my estimation on this re-read). It's a traditional tale, in a way, but only because it existed to add to that received tradition. So here's Benson giving us a small, rural English town upon which falls the curse of vampirism but his twist (re-invention would be a bit strong) is that the source is a plump, healthy and robust British widow, all bustle and energy in the bright sunlight and little friendly visits in the evening to play cards - very social and chummy (the better for her own ends). It finishes the way these things traditionally finish and is best read and enjoyed for its grace notes on a familiar theme.
Another giant of the field is represented here with "The Mannikin". This Robert Bloch story is from early in his career when he was still digesting Lovecraft, using HPL's invented cosmology as an extra tint to standard black magic doings but enlivened by Bloch's style of the grotesque - in a sense, this is Bloch exploring ideas he'd later use in his story "Enoch", while it also fiddles with a variant of the big reveal of The Dunwich Horror. A professor meets up with a fellow scholar - a deformed, sombre, hunchbacked genius who's researching occult knowledge and occasionally doesn't act like himself. A perfectly serviceable, if unexceptional, story with a predictable twist, some plastered in Lovecraftian tomes, and one of those endings where a note is seemingly desperately scribbled out explaining what's going on even as the horror advances.
And here we come to one of those occasional things that happens. Everyone has a classic story or two, beloved by almost all, that just doesn't click with them. "The Wendigo" is one of those for me ("Green Tea" is another) and so I looked forward to the chance to re-read it after some time had passed and see if I'd reevaluate it on less critical terms. I did, much like the Benson, move it a notch up but that's not because my initial problems with it have dimmed in any way, but more because I have a better grasp on Algernon Blackwood's approach, along with his relative strengths and weaknesses. Two men camping in the deep Canadian forests find themselves beset by odd occurrences that lead to one's disappearance. When the rest of their party returns to the campsite later, more horror ensues. There's lots to like here - Blackwood does a great job with group and interpersonal dynamics and character psychology (keep an eye out for the unintentional - or is it? - homoerotic aspect of manly men in the woods and its culmination in the tent scene). And, as might be expected, there's some marvelous wilderness description here (drawn from personal experience), with his usual focus on the fastness, awe and sheer power of nature and the open, wild space that spills out loneliness, solitude and madness. The "monster" here is strange and folkloric, part animal and part air spirit - thus both primal and ethereal - and the way it "abducts" its victim (and the appearance of that classic Fortean phenomena "the human voice calling for help from an empty sky") make for some strong eeriness (not to mention the feet licking!). There's even a powerful and weird manifestation of it at a campfire late in the story. But given all that, I'd still say that the slow accrual of detail (which Blackwood usually excels at) here comes across as long-windedness at times (a problem he himself seemed to work at, fine-tuning and tightening his writing later in his career) and, yes I'll say it, I still find the evocatively intended "last words" to be more absurd than eerie. Still not my favorite Blackwood but I now think it would make for an interesting, if difficult, short film.
Moving on to the solidly good stories, we come upon "The Day Of The Dragon" by Guy Endore, a somewhat satirical tale that starts with a classic piece of Forteana (a Toad In A Hole), moves on to yellow journalists exploiting a scientifically ignorant public (how contemporary!) and the mad dreams of an impoverished professor of Biology, and finishes with the end of mankind! Darkly humorous.
William Sambrot's "Creature Of The Snows" is a Yeti tale and a good example of a monster story that is not, specifically, a *horror* story, and instead falls into that area of suspenseful, ARGOSY-style, Men's Own Adventure writing. There's even an emotionally complicated sentiment at the climax for a young reader to puzzle over and widen their world...
"Mimic" by Donald A. Wollheim has been around long enough to be turned into a movie franchise but the originating text is a terse little monster story of natural camouflage in an urban setting. It's still just as concise and precise as it needs to be - less a story than a sketch of an idea, but that's all it really needs to be to not waste your time. The final moments, which imply even greater subterfuge, are a brilliant topper.
I read a spate of Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories back in the 80s and only recently began to run into his work again, to be examined by my more seasoned eye. I've always felt Wellman's writing was something of a mixed bag: great ideas but solid to shaky execution. This would be my first Silver John story read in more than a decade and, never having read this particular one at all, I found myself enjoying it. Wellman's conception of a backwoods, Okie monster fighter using basic purity and goodwill (not to mention love, perseverance and song) against Appalachian evil is certainly a great one, charming and sensible in a way that seems to craft the stories into oral legend right before your eyes. In this one ("O Ugly Bird"), John runs into a malignant old cuss who keeps the inhabitants of a valley under his thumb with the help of a large, sinister buzzard-looking bird. And, once again, humble forthrightness and silver guitar strings save the day. A charming little dark fantasy monster yarn.
"Aepyornis Island" by H.G. Wells, a story I read as a youngster, is a fun "Monster tale as Robinson Crusoe-style survival story." An operative for museums gets stranded on a desert island with a similarly stranded (and rapidly maturing) prehistoric throwback. A splendid yarn, not a horror story at all, with some nicely dry British humor regarding the relationship between the man and his fellow castaway.
I've read some Lord Dunsany before but encountering his tale "The Hoard Of The Gibbelins" here for the first time, it suddenly clicked that Dunsany occupies a very interesting, transitional position in fantasy writing - sketching out an approach to "Modern Fantasy" based on recapitulating the fantasy tropes of old in a new, somewhat ironic and studied mode, for modern audiences (and his influence on Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft in that specific regard should not be underestimated). And in this mode, in this tale, Dunsany is extraordinary - here we have The Gibbelins, living just outside Terra Cognita, who feed their rapacious appetites by sowing stories into the real world of their vast treasure holdings. And so there are noble(?) quests to steal the loot, and so, food. And so, a knight tries to out-think the scenario. An archly fun tale of fantasy with an archly ironic ending, perhaps intended as a warning about bringing too much "realism" to fantastic tropes, and how little that will help?
Here also is the redoubtable William Hope Hodgson with another nautical horror story that also involves fungus, "The Derelict". Following a storm, a schooner stumbles across a derelict ship adrift nearby, indeterminately old, and upon boarding the hulk the usual exploratory venture below decks is blocked by a hideous discovery that the ship is literally encased in mold. In fact, a voracious and vigorous mold blob that turns the exploration into an attempt to survive and leave the derelict alive. It's a marvelous monster story: engaging, exciting, atmospheric (I love that as they approach initially, the derelict is framed against and nearly blotted out by the crimson light of the setting sun) and creepy in turn (it bleeds purple ichor!).
Also quite enjoyable is Robert Arthur's own "Footsteps Invisible" in which (as you may have guessed from the title) the monster never actually "appears" but we still experience the travails of a British archeologist fleeing the shuffling thing that pursues him around the globe and a blind news-seller he befriends. An exceedingly aural tale, which is a wise choice given the whole approach, and I like the little fillip on the end of the story that implies a continuation of the curse in unexpected ways. Good stuff. We presented it on Pseudopod!
So, a monster anthology from 1968 - take your pick!
So here we have MONSTER MIX, edited by the redoubtable Robert Arthur, a hero of mine and general genre journeyman who wrote many things (some short fiction, THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER radio show, the ALFRED HITCHCOCK & THE THREE INVESTIGATORS book series of my youth) and edited many things (he was the written "voice" of Hitch when he edited the director's paperback anthology series) - and here's another one! Arthur uses the introduction to mostly bemoan the fact that "monster", at that moment in time, meant Kaiju and giant atomic insects, and while I don't share his lament, it's an understandable viewpoint from the time period and from a particular age group at that time.
And what you get here is a nice assortment of monster stories of various hues, which is interesting. A third of them I'd read before (but re-read for the review) and a third were on my "to read" list, which leaves a last third of unknown quantity. Excellent...
One example of those "different hues" is "Fire In The Galley Stove" by William Outerson. This tale acts as a roundabout "explanation" for the mystery of abandoned ships (see The Marie Celeste) and is told in a dry, workmanlike manner and barely exploits its plot details for any effect (Why is it in this collection? Well... ). Not bad for a young reader as a potential adventure story but told as a journalistic report, it also lacks the *zing* of that same adventure.
Another hue, and a bit unexpected, is "monster story as humorous political folklore" with Stephen Vincent Benét's "Daniel Webster And The Sea Serpent", a follow-up to that affable title character's run in with Old Nick. Here, the always trustworthy politician has an encounter with an amorous sea-monster named Samanthy just as he's trying to negotiate a treaty with England. There's some political digs ("Britannia rules the waves") and understatement ("it was what you might call kind of an impressive sight") and overall it's a cute slice of odd, whimsical fantasy.
E.F. Benson gives us our vampire story, with the classic "Mrs. Amworth" (previously read, but which went up a notch in my estimation on this re-read). It's a traditional tale, in a way, but only because it existed to add to that received tradition. So here's Benson giving us a small, rural English town upon which falls the curse of vampirism but his twist (re-invention would be a bit strong) is that the source is a plump, healthy and robust British widow, all bustle and energy in the bright sunlight and little friendly visits in the evening to play cards - very social and chummy (the better for her own ends). It finishes the way these things traditionally finish and is best read and enjoyed for its grace notes on a familiar theme.
Another giant of the field is represented here with "The Mannikin". This Robert Bloch story is from early in his career when he was still digesting Lovecraft, using HPL's invented cosmology as an extra tint to standard black magic doings but enlivened by Bloch's style of the grotesque - in a sense, this is Bloch exploring ideas he'd later use in his story "Enoch", while it also fiddles with a variant of the big reveal of The Dunwich Horror. A professor meets up with a fellow scholar - a deformed, sombre, hunchbacked genius who's researching occult knowledge and occasionally doesn't act like himself. A perfectly serviceable, if unexceptional, story with a predictable twist, some plastered in Lovecraftian tomes, and one of those endings where a note is seemingly desperately scribbled out explaining what's going on even as the horror advances.
And here we come to one of those occasional things that happens. Everyone has a classic story or two, beloved by almost all, that just doesn't click with them. "The Wendigo" is one of those for me ("Green Tea" is another) and so I looked forward to the chance to re-read it after some time had passed and see if I'd reevaluate it on less critical terms. I did, much like the Benson, move it a notch up but that's not because my initial problems with it have dimmed in any way, but more because I have a better grasp on Algernon Blackwood's approach, along with his relative strengths and weaknesses. Two men camping in the deep Canadian forests find themselves beset by odd occurrences that lead to one's disappearance. When the rest of their party returns to the campsite later, more horror ensues. There's lots to like here - Blackwood does a great job with group and interpersonal dynamics and character psychology (keep an eye out for the unintentional - or is it? - homoerotic aspect of manly men in the woods and its culmination in the tent scene). And, as might be expected, there's some marvelous wilderness description here (drawn from personal experience), with his usual focus on the fastness, awe and sheer power of nature and the open, wild space that spills out loneliness, solitude and madness. The "monster" here is strange and folkloric, part animal and part air spirit - thus both primal and ethereal - and the way it "abducts" its victim (and the appearance of that classic Fortean phenomena "the human voice calling for help from an empty sky") make for some strong eeriness (not to mention the feet licking!). There's even a powerful and weird manifestation of it at a campfire late in the story. But given all that, I'd still say that the slow accrual of detail (which Blackwood usually excels at) here comes across as long-windedness at times (a problem he himself seemed to work at, fine-tuning and tightening his writing later in his career) and, yes I'll say it, I still find the evocatively intended "last words" to be more absurd than eerie. Still not my favorite Blackwood but I now think it would make for an interesting, if difficult, short film.
Moving on to the solidly good stories, we come upon "The Day Of The Dragon" by Guy Endore, a somewhat satirical tale that starts with a classic piece of Forteana (a Toad In A Hole), moves on to yellow journalists exploiting a scientifically ignorant public (how contemporary!) and the mad dreams of an impoverished professor of Biology, and finishes with the end of mankind! Darkly humorous.
William Sambrot's "Creature Of The Snows" is a Yeti tale and a good example of a monster story that is not, specifically, a *horror* story, and instead falls into that area of suspenseful, ARGOSY-style, Men's Own Adventure writing. There's even an emotionally complicated sentiment at the climax for a young reader to puzzle over and widen their world...
"Mimic" by Donald A. Wollheim has been around long enough to be turned into a movie franchise but the originating text is a terse little monster story of natural camouflage in an urban setting. It's still just as concise and precise as it needs to be - less a story than a sketch of an idea, but that's all it really needs to be to not waste your time. The final moments, which imply even greater subterfuge, are a brilliant topper.
I read a spate of Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories back in the 80s and only recently began to run into his work again, to be examined by my more seasoned eye. I've always felt Wellman's writing was something of a mixed bag: great ideas but solid to shaky execution. This would be my first Silver John story read in more than a decade and, never having read this particular one at all, I found myself enjoying it. Wellman's conception of a backwoods, Okie monster fighter using basic purity and goodwill (not to mention love, perseverance and song) against Appalachian evil is certainly a great one, charming and sensible in a way that seems to craft the stories into oral legend right before your eyes. In this one ("O Ugly Bird"), John runs into a malignant old cuss who keeps the inhabitants of a valley under his thumb with the help of a large, sinister buzzard-looking bird. And, once again, humble forthrightness and silver guitar strings save the day. A charming little dark fantasy monster yarn.
"Aepyornis Island" by H.G. Wells, a story I read as a youngster, is a fun "Monster tale as Robinson Crusoe-style survival story." An operative for museums gets stranded on a desert island with a similarly stranded (and rapidly maturing) prehistoric throwback. A splendid yarn, not a horror story at all, with some nicely dry British humor regarding the relationship between the man and his fellow castaway.
I've read some Lord Dunsany before but encountering his tale "The Hoard Of The Gibbelins" here for the first time, it suddenly clicked that Dunsany occupies a very interesting, transitional position in fantasy writing - sketching out an approach to "Modern Fantasy" based on recapitulating the fantasy tropes of old in a new, somewhat ironic and studied mode, for modern audiences (and his influence on Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft in that specific regard should not be underestimated). And in this mode, in this tale, Dunsany is extraordinary - here we have The Gibbelins, living just outside Terra Cognita, who feed their rapacious appetites by sowing stories into the real world of their vast treasure holdings. And so there are noble(?) quests to steal the loot, and so, food. And so, a knight tries to out-think the scenario. An archly fun tale of fantasy with an archly ironic ending, perhaps intended as a warning about bringing too much "realism" to fantastic tropes, and how little that will help?
Here also is the redoubtable William Hope Hodgson with another nautical horror story that also involves fungus, "The Derelict". Following a storm, a schooner stumbles across a derelict ship adrift nearby, indeterminately old, and upon boarding the hulk the usual exploratory venture below decks is blocked by a hideous discovery that the ship is literally encased in mold. In fact, a voracious and vigorous mold blob that turns the exploration into an attempt to survive and leave the derelict alive. It's a marvelous monster story: engaging, exciting, atmospheric (I love that as they approach initially, the derelict is framed against and nearly blotted out by the crimson light of the setting sun) and creepy in turn (it bleeds purple ichor!).
Also quite enjoyable is Robert Arthur's own "Footsteps Invisible" in which (as you may have guessed from the title) the monster never actually "appears" but we still experience the travails of a British archeologist fleeing the shuffling thing that pursues him around the globe and a blind news-seller he befriends. An exceedingly aural tale, which is a wise choice given the whole approach, and I like the little fillip on the end of the story that implies a continuation of the curse in unexpected ways. Good stuff. We presented it on Pseudopod!
So, a monster anthology from 1968 - take your pick!
November 18, 2012
Read this collection at age 12 and it burned holes in my brain. Old fashioned, but very well written,(and quite diverse) stories about giant bugs, sea serpents, dragons, etc. - the kind of things all teenagers love! From the icy formal prose of Lord Dunsany to the Appalachian folktale by Manley Wade Wellman, this is highly recommended, especially for young adults. (You know a book is good when Hollywood comes calling - and 6 out of these 13 stories have been made into movies).
May 27, 2012
This is another used paperback I got from Myopic Books.
A horror story is about The Menace. The menace might be supernatural, say a werewolf; it might be naturalistic, say a plague.
The menace in the thirteen stories of this book are monsters, which the editor distinguishes into the Traditional, the Natural, and the Imaginative.
Most of the stories in this book didn't grab me. I think that is due to the prose style and the approach taken by the authors. Most of these stories were published before 1950. For example, the story "The Day of the Dragon", published in 1934, breaks a rule of good fiction writing: show, don't tell. This is a story of a scientist whose experiments on crocodiles transformed these creatures into large, flying dragons. These dragons have all but defeated the human race. In this story, there is a section where the scientists describes his experiments and how the crocodiles transformed, which I found uninteresting balderdash.
A story I found worth reading was "The Mannikin" by Robert Bloch, published in 1937, so the author was around 20 years old at the time. The story shows the stylistic influence of Bloch's mentor and friend, H.P. Lovecraft. In this story, the narrator recounts his acquaintance with a sickly scholar who has a hump on his back. This hump seems to move. It turns out that this hump was actually a parasitical, demonic being living inside the scholar.
"Mimic" by Donald Wollheim was the inspiration for the movie Mimic (source: Wikipedia), though there is much difference between the two. Wollheim utilizes the biological fact that some animals use camouflage in the struggle to survive. In the story, a creature camouflages itself as a human being. The story has a good, twist ending.
The stories in this book:
"The Day of the Dragon" by Guy Endore
"Mrs. Amworth" by E.F. Benson
"Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent" by Stephen Vincent Benet
"Creature of the Snows" by William Sambrot
"Aepyornis Island" by H.G. Wells
"Fire in the Galley Stove" by William Outerson
"The Mannikin" by Robert Bloch
"The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood
"The Derelict" by William Hope Hodgson
"O Ugly Bird" by Manly Wade Wellman"
"Mimic" by Donald Wollheim
"The Hoard of the Gibbelins" by Lord Dunsany
"Footsteps Invisible" by Robert Arthur
A horror story is about The Menace. The menace might be supernatural, say a werewolf; it might be naturalistic, say a plague.
The menace in the thirteen stories of this book are monsters, which the editor distinguishes into the Traditional, the Natural, and the Imaginative.
Most of the stories in this book didn't grab me. I think that is due to the prose style and the approach taken by the authors. Most of these stories were published before 1950. For example, the story "The Day of the Dragon", published in 1934, breaks a rule of good fiction writing: show, don't tell. This is a story of a scientist whose experiments on crocodiles transformed these creatures into large, flying dragons. These dragons have all but defeated the human race. In this story, there is a section where the scientists describes his experiments and how the crocodiles transformed, which I found uninteresting balderdash.
A story I found worth reading was "The Mannikin" by Robert Bloch, published in 1937, so the author was around 20 years old at the time. The story shows the stylistic influence of Bloch's mentor and friend, H.P. Lovecraft. In this story, the narrator recounts his acquaintance with a sickly scholar who has a hump on his back. This hump seems to move. It turns out that this hump was actually a parasitical, demonic being living inside the scholar.
"Mimic" by Donald Wollheim was the inspiration for the movie Mimic (source: Wikipedia), though there is much difference between the two. Wollheim utilizes the biological fact that some animals use camouflage in the struggle to survive. In the story, a creature camouflages itself as a human being. The story has a good, twist ending.
The stories in this book:
"The Day of the Dragon" by Guy Endore
"Mrs. Amworth" by E.F. Benson
"Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent" by Stephen Vincent Benet
"Creature of the Snows" by William Sambrot
"Aepyornis Island" by H.G. Wells
"Fire in the Galley Stove" by William Outerson
"The Mannikin" by Robert Bloch
"The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood
"The Derelict" by William Hope Hodgson
"O Ugly Bird" by Manly Wade Wellman"
"Mimic" by Donald Wollheim
"The Hoard of the Gibbelins" by Lord Dunsany
"Footsteps Invisible" by Robert Arthur
December 8, 2015
A childhood favorite--some of the stories, like "The Mannikin" and "The Wendigo," still give me shudders!
June 4, 2023
MONSTER MIX
This is one of my childhood memories. I got this book in grammar school ordered it from a catalogue. A nice way to keep kids literate and grease some palms back in the day. I kno-ok boomer! haha
Anyway, "The Mannikin", scared the shit outta me as I remember. This book was responsible in part for a love of horror fiction that lasts till this day.
This is one of my childhood memories. I got this book in grammar school ordered it from a catalogue. A nice way to keep kids literate and grease some palms back in the day. I kno-ok boomer! haha
Anyway, "The Mannikin", scared the shit outta me as I remember. This book was responsible in part for a love of horror fiction that lasts till this day.
Read
January 19, 2021Full review: https://monsterbookclub.com/2021/01/1...
December 31, 2025
✔️ Fire in the Galley Stove, by William Outerson 12/31/2025
Read
June 22, 2024NA GR:
O Ugly Bird! ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Amazon now says NOT A BOOK… Ugly birds look like humans and ugly humans look like birds. Which are more accursed? I’d say the former.
Creature of the Snows
Fire in the Galley Stove ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: You can’t eat just one.
Footsteps Invisible
O Ugly Bird! ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Amazon now says NOT A BOOK… Ugly birds look like humans and ugly humans look like birds. Which are more accursed? I’d say the former.
Creature of the Snows
Fire in the Galley Stove ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: You can’t eat just one.
Footsteps Invisible
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