This post is brought to you by The Devil’s Defile: Weird Tales From Devil’s Gulch, edited by G. W. Thomas. The Weird West was never weirder in this shared world anthology set in a town haunted by ghosts and worse. “If Music Be the Food of Love” by M. D. Jackson gets things rolling with a man seeking a lost macabre masterpiece. “Dark Raven” by T. Neil Thomas follows hanging Judge Galbraith to a haunted house where he will win (or lose?) a bet. “The Black Lake” by Jack Mackenzie has a quest for the location of this terrible body of water. “The Ghost Gun” by G. W. Thomas is a portfolio of tales featuring Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope as he fills the Ghost Gun with monster bullets, knowing that one day he will have to face Death himself. This collection of interconnected tales features illustrations and cover by M. D. Jackson.
We tend to take Horror anthologies for granted. Want a collection of cutting edge Horror. No problem. There are several Years’ Best anthologies if you are too lazy to go looking for them. Want Cthulhu Mythos tales filled with Cthulhu and Deep Ones? No problem. Science Fiction/Horror, new collections by C. L. Grant, David Schiff, Stephen Jones, etc. etc. Since the 1980s, we have published dozens of dozens of books for all tastes.
Back in 1920, not so much. There were ghost story collections before the second decade. 1844 gave us Tales From Germany by Oxenford & Feiling. (Horror started in Germany along with fairy tales and E. T. A. Hoffman.) 1848 had Tales of Terror by Henry St Clair. 1907 gave us Shapes That Haunt the Dusk by Mills & Alden from the pages of Harper’s. 1913’s Ghosts & Goblins from the UK is a Pulp before Pulp collections. Pearson’s, the British publisher did Uncanny Stories in 1916. Arthur b. Reeve offered Best Ghost Stories in 1919 for The Modern Library. The stage was set but what was missing was the Pulps.
Weird Tales appeared in March 1923 and everything changed. Not instantly, but gradually, with the replacement of the Victorian ghost story with Pulp Horror.
Joseph Lewis French (1858-1936)
French was once called “the most industrious anthologist of his time” by The New York Times. He produced twenty-five books between 1918 and 1936 for Doubleday including those about detectives, cowboys and pirates. Among these were ghost story and Horror collections. French selects from the best of the Victorian and Edwardians with very little current material. He does not use Pulp fiction.
(1920) Masterpieces of Mystery Mystic-Humorous Stories
(1920) The Best Psychic Stories
(1922) Masterpieces of Mystery Ghost Stories
(1925) Tales of Terror
(1926) Ghosts Grim and Gentle
Dorothy Scarborough (1878-1935)
These two anthologies grew out of Scarborough’s thesis The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917). She followed up her book with two anthologies. She relied less on the Victorian using magazine fiction that were not Pulps. She tends towards more American selections, too.
(1921) Famous Modern Ghost Stories
(1921) Humorous Ghost Stories
V. H. Collins (1872-1966)
These two were part of the World Classics series.
(1924) Ghosts and Marvels featuring an introduction by M. R. James
(1925) More Ghosts and Marvels
Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985)
Thomson became the queen of Horror anthologies. It was Not At Night that established that Horror anthologies could make money. Thomson filling her books with cheap reprints from Weird Tales as well as new tales by English writer as well as her own under the name Flavia Richardson and stories by her husband Oscar Cook. These were some of the books Paul S. Power referred to in Pulp Writer (2007) when he said:
Just for an example, here’s how it worked out in my case. Among the stories of mine that were published in Weird Tales were “The Life Serum” and “Monsters of the Pit,” the latter being featured on the cover. I received about fi fty dollars for the two (not for each) and some ten years elapsed. I had forgotten the yarns until one day I happened to open the current Best Short Stories of 1929—by O’Brien. This annual volume contained a list of short stories that had been published in book form during the twelvemonth. I was surprised to see my name there as the author of “Monsters of the Pit” and “The Life Serum,” which had just been published in a collection edited by Herbert Asbury: Not at Night. It was the first I’d heard about it, and I ordered a copy. When it came, I found the “blurb” on the dust jacket extremely interesting. It stated that the book had been published in England under a different title and that it had sold more than 100,000 copies there. As only a few authors were represented, and I had two stories in the volume, I estimated that my share of the royalties should have been several thousand dollars, not including those from the American publication of the book. Of course, there was nothing I could do, except smile —with my teeth in close contact. Somebody must have made considerable money out of the work that I had done on a rather empty stomach ten years before —but they made it legally. If I had received some complimentary copies of the book I might not have felt so indignant.
Thomson success ignited a publishing craze in the UK that will give us The Pan Book of Horror, The Fontana Book of Horror and The Mayflower Book of Horror along with Oxford and Penguin collections. Later anthologists owe a debt to this collector who wasn’t afraid to use more modern and graphic stories.
(1925) Not at Night
(1926) More Not at Night
(1927) You’ll Need a Night Light
(1928) Gruesome Cargoes
(1929) By Daylight Only
Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887-1960)
Lady Cynthia Asquith was a writer and editor. She continued her Ghost Book series in the 1950s. She included some of her own ghost stories as C. L. Ray. Asquith tends to use English authors.
(1926) The Ghost Book
(1928) The Black Cap
(1929) Shudders
Singles
(1921)Devil Stories by Maximillan J. Rudwin (1885-1946) uses older material from British and French mostly.
(1923) The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories has a nice mix of English, French and American authors from Victorian to modern magazine fiction.
(1924) A Muster of Ghosts by Bohun Lynch (1884-1928) is mostly Victorian English writers.
(1927) The Moon Terror edited by Farnsworth Wright was the editor of Weird Tales experiment in book publishing. The title sold so poorly it was later given away free with subscriptions. The contents were partly from Weird Tales (like the titular novella) but also from other Pulps.
(1929)Beware the Dark by T. Everrett Hare (1884-1948) has a nice mix of Edwardians and Pulpsters like H. P. Lovecraft.
Conclusion
The 1930s will see the number of volumes climb along with more famous editors (like Montague Summers’ The Supernatural Omnibus (1931) The Creeps Omnibus (1935) edited by Charles Birkin. They deserve their own post, of course.) Successful titles like Not at Night will give us more volumes. More and more anthologies will use Pulp fiction. Dashiell Hammett in Modern Tales of Horror (1932) will select Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. Mammoth Books will have their first Horror collection, so lots more to come.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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