![]() He’s contacted by an old school friend, Philip Franton. Wakefield concerns a barrister named Edward Bellamy. Some nice local color, but the twist is telegraphed. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to the superstition about bats on the ground. Finnish-American farmer Elof Bocak is crossing the fields at night to woo his neighbor, Kate O’Mecca. “The Hand of the O’Mecca” by Howard Wandrei is set in Minnesota, not far from Mankato. The ending is kind of kludgy, suggesting the whole story is a metaphor. The narrator urges Johnson not to look behind him, but of course he does and dooms himself. The reader is addressed as though they were Johnson, who is pursued by a mysterious blind, handless man. “Johnson Looked Back” by Thomas Burke is a rare second-person story. ![]() Carnby needs some passages from the Necronomicon translated at the highest priority, passages about sorcerers being able to come back from the dead. Supposedly, the noises in the halls are rats, but the glimpses the secretary gets don’t look like any rats he’s ever seen. Carnby turns out to be an occultist with eccentric habits, and a fear of leaving his room at night. “The Return of the Sorcerer” by Clark Ashton Smith has a desperately unemployed man (who happens to know Arabic) get a job as secretary to reclusive scholar John Carnby. The room’s atmosphere is oppressive, leading to thoughts of suicide. Wait, there is one room, but the catch is that the occupant just vanished a couple of days ago–they may or may not be returning. A schoolteacher who altered his holiday plans on a whim finds himself at a Swiss inn with no vacancies. “The Occupant of the Room” by Algernon Blackwood is the oldest story in the collection. It starts well, but the explanation for the terror is heavily racist, involving some dubious genetics and “race memory.” Also, the ending is an anticlimax. A man who’s had an ugly growth removed is hunted by a small but deadly enemy. The moment of most terror is a lock that should not be open being open. That aside, it’s an excellent example of horror by implication–none of the presumably gory bits happen on page, and the results are not directly described. Like many tales from the era, it’s told at a remove, reported by someone who found the protagonist’s papers and pieced together the story from them. James leads off with the tale of a would-be travel book writer who visits Sweden and wakes up something that should have been kept sleeping. To make it a manageable size with the binding limitations of the time, only the first nine stories were included and presumably there would have been a sequel with the rest had sales justified it. In the 1960s, a paperback reprint came out. ![]() It featured primarily creepy stories from the pulp magazines of the 1930s. James leads off with Sleep No More was a 1940s anthology of horror fiction put together by noted Wisconsin historical fiction (and horror) author August Derleth. Sleep No More was a 1940s anthology of horror fiction put together by noted Wisconsin historical fiction (and horror) author August Derleth.
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