This is pure nostalgia for me, these Dell Hitchcock anthologies. After exploring the works of Poe (and before discovering King and Lovecraft) a helpful employee at our town's tiny bookstore put this into my hands. I'd recently discovered the films of Hitchcock and I was intrigued.
Months later, sometime in the mid-90's I went to what was undoubtedly the seediest, dirtiest used bookstore I've ever been to in my life. The guy behind the register looked like he'd just worked under a car (perhaps he had) he was smoking a cigarette, his shirt was stained, dirty and full of holes. The whole place smelled; it was dark, hot, the grit on the bare concrete floor scraped under my sneakers. There was a perpetual wind and roaring as they futilely attempted to abate the blazing Georgia summer heat with the doors propped open and some dirty old box fans blowing.
BUT, I'd called ahead and knew they had TONS of these old books. Everything receded into the background as I pulled out pile after pile of them...Hitchcock Presents: Terror Time!, Hitchcock Presents: Grave Business! It was one of those moments reserved for young bibliophiles. They weren't always in great shape and they were cheaply made with spines that cracked and darkly yellowed pages that could fall out with rough handling. These books are still among the most aromatic old books my olfactory receptors have encountered. I bought up everything my meager funds could afford. Fortunately these were really cheap back then -- they're not exactly rare these days, but you're not going to get them nowadays for $1~ a piece either.
I would find out later that Alfred Hitchcock himself likely had little to do with these books at all. Many of them, especially in later years, were reprints of stories from Alfred Hithcock's Mystery Magazine. The earlier collections however, going back to the 40's and 50's contained a mix of older horror and ghost stories and newer material, while the later books were almost exclusively crime stories.
This particular volume is more horror-focused than most of the Hitchcock paperbacks. This is actually a reprint of half of the stories from a hardback put out by Random House in the mid-60's titled "Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me." The other half would be reprinted in another Dell paperback titled "Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Slay Ride."
One can imagine, with all of this reprinting and book splitting it was difficult to ascertain where these stories were coming from and how many books there were in this "Hitchcock Presents" series. When I first discovered these there was no internet, so I only culled information by calling around bookstores in the Yellow Pages ("Let your fingers do the walking!"), always finding a new title. Now we know there's not an endless number of these, but there were about 70.
Re-reading these again after many years, some of these hold up better than I expected, although to my more jaded eyes, the majority are clearly just mildly entertaining. I will admit, I've thought about some of these stories for over a quarter of a century, longer than anything else I've read. Several of them made a big impression on me, if nothing else, these were a gateway drug.
Just a few of my favorites:
Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb - This is a creepy swamp story from 1913 that has been reprinted many times.
A Death in the Family by Miriam Allen deFord - This story really shocked me as a kid.
The Knife by Robert Arthur - This is another story that I recall vividly, about a cursed knife. I can't say this is a great tale, but it has a great, winking dark humor.
The Estuary by Margaret St. Clair - This story scared me more than anything else in this book, I got a genuine shiver from this one. This was originally published in Weird Tales under the title "The Last Three Ships."
Tough Town by William Sambrot - I distinctly recall reading this story first. It's not a great story, but it does have a sort of grim charm.
Journey to Death by Donald E. Westlake - This story is quite good, with a gruesome, shocking ending. Two men are trapped together in a sealed room after a ship sinks, and one of them seems to be losing his sanity.
It by Theodore Sturgeon - This is another story that has been reprinted so many times it's ridiculous, over FIFTY times according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.