Armchair Fiction presents extra large paperback collections of the best in classic horror short stories. "Horror Gems, Vol. Three" features a fine collection of tales by some of the genre’s best authors: August Derleth, Fritz Leiber, Jack Sharkey, Seabury Quinn, Rog Phillips, H. Russell Wakefield, Stanton A. Coblentz, Margaret St. Clair, Evangeline Walton, Gregory Luce, and others as they lead you down dark, lonely paths that aren’t always friendly.
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and for his own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the Cosmic Horror genre, as well as his founding of the publisher Arkham House (which did much to bring supernatural fiction into print in hardcover in the US that had only been readily available in the UK), Derleth was a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography
A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing
The three best stories were ones I had already read: the two Fritz Leiber stories, which were as much satire as horror, and the St. Clair, which has been reprinted many times.
"Horn o'Plenty" was a fun read, but I'd consider it fantasy not horror. "Hand of St. Ury" had a good energy as well. The Evangeline Walton story was of interest for its Greek Civil War background.
The rest of the stories were of the "Gee, I guess I saw a ghost" variety. Indeed, one story was a variant of "the vanishing hitchhiker" that even though I had never read it before could predict.