The weather went from being beautiful to tempestuous: torrential thunderstorms plagued the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori. The weather -- along with the company and the eerie ambiance of the locale -- contributed to the genesis of _Frankenstein, _ Polidori's "The Vampyre," and, in all likelihood, modern weird fiction. On the night of June 16th, the group read aloud a collection of German ghost stories, _The Fantasmagoriana._ This inspired Byron to challenge the group to write a ghost story. Shelley wrote an forgettable story; Byron wrote a story fragment; and Polidori began the "The Vampyre," the first modern vampire tale. (Jacketless library hardcover.)

As vacation time approached, Dick and Doc had become as hard as nails and as active as a couple of manus, which you will know, if your education has not been neglected, is the ape-word for monkeys. Then it was that the big surprise came in a letter that Dick received from his mother. Tarzan of the Apes had invited them all to visit him and spend two months on his great African estate! The boys were so excited that they talked until three o'clock the next morning and flunked in all their classes that day.

From the Manuscript discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland -- a place known in certain arcane circles to be the Borderland between Earth and Faerie. A classic novel of horror by the acclaimed master of the macabre, William Hope Hodgson. (This jacketless hardcover edition is intended for the library trade.)

A definitive look at the life and work of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, by a leading scholar of the fantasy and horror field.

Sherlock Holmes was Arthur Conan Doyle's miracle. Like many miracles, it came of its own accord and rather overwhelmed its recipient. There may have been times when St. Paul, after his experience on the road to Damascus, really wished he could go back to his old life, but he couldn't, and he knew it. Conan Doyle, too, reluctantly came to the same conclusion, though only after a desperate struggle. He felt that the Holmes stories were taking time and public attention away from his more serious work. So, with great deliberation he killed off his detective in the 24th story in the series, the ominously entitled "The Final Problem," sending both Holmes and his arch-nemesis created for the occasion, the "Napoleon of Crime," Dr. Moriarty, over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. That, Doyle sincerely hoped, would be the end of that. But miracles do not stay dead, of course, even if, during the period in which Holmes was officially deceased, the fantasy-humorist John Kendrick Bangs, with permission, depicted the posthumous doings of Sherlock Holmes's shade on the River Styx in The Pursuit of the House-Boat (1897). In his unsuccessful attempt to kill off Holmes, Doyle came very close to creating a second immortal character, in the person of Moriarty, who has certainly had a substantial later career in the hands of other writers. "The Final Problem" appeared in 1893. For all Conan Doyle might have wished otherwise, the world had not seen the last of Sherlock Holmes. Collected here in this giant oversized volume are nine Sherlock Homes books including A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear, A Double Barreled Detective Story by Mark Twain, and The Pursuit of the House-Boat by John Kendrick Bangs, with an authoritative introduction by Darrell Schweitzer. No other Holmes collection includes the books by Bangs, which was the only use of Holmes that Doyle himself ever authorized, and Twain, who was the most famous author other than Doyle to write a Sherlock Holmes story. More than 1,000 pages of Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

Darrell Schweitzer, author of The Mask of the Sorcerer and editor of Weird Tales collaborates with macabre artist-writer Jason Van Hollander on a series of remarkable fantasies, variously grotesque, horrific, ethereal, and darkly comic.

Here you will find the collective experience of three writers and editors distilled into a complete guide to writing science fiction. It contains separate chapters covering idea, plot, character, background, Science, tragedy, and comedy. The twelve stories, each a first sale by its author, illustrate the main points of the book. A foreword by Isaac Asimov gives an overall look at the task of becoming an SF writer, and an appendix by the editors explains exactly how to prepare a manuscript for publication.

A baker's dozen of classic pulp stories, by a master of the genre! "Satan's Daughter and Other Tales from the Pulps" include such rare gems as the title story, "Scourge of the Silver Dragon," "Revolt of the Damned," "Pit of Madness," "The Walking Dead," "Drink or Draw," and many more.

This volume collects H.P. Lovecraft's three major works on fantasy fiction: "Supernatural Horror in Literature" -- his survey of the weird and supernatural in fiction; and "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" and "Notes on Writing Interplanetary Fiction" -- his how-to essays on crafting solid, aesthetically pleasing works in those genres. An essential volume for scholars, writers, and those interesting in the history and craftsmanship of the fantasy genre.

"The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery." -- H.P. Lovecraft

"The Ghost Pirates . . . is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power." -- H.P. Lovecraft

Included in this volume are historic interviews with Alfred Bester, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss, James Gunn, Gardner Dozois, Norman Spinrad, Gordon R. Dickson, Ben Bova, Ted White, Jack Williamson, L. Sprague de Camp, Frank Belknap Long, Gahan Wilson, and Jerry Pournelle.

When one thinks of the classic adventure-story authors of the pulp fiction era, H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, and Rafael Sabatini may come first to mind. But Arthur O. Friel's stellar contributions -- particularly his stories featuring Lourenco and Pedro, two workers on a rubber-tree plantation in the Amazon Jungle. Their adventures in the Amazon's mysterious back-country certainly deserve honorable mention. Here are tales of peril and last-minute rescue, brutal savages and men of honor, snake-worshipping armies and half-ape Lost Races-and many more! For in the shadows of the rain-forest, many evils lurk . . . human and otherwise! Features a new introduction by Darrell Schweitzer, eight short stories, and The Jararaca, a complete novel.