Occult & Horror Fiction 3

I shall polish off the remainder of my collection of occult and horror fiction tonight, starting with a collection of spooky stories written by women. The book is entitled, appropriately enough, Haunting Women edited by Alan Ryan and published in 1988 by Avon.

Next, two novels by American SF writer Lucius Shephard, Green Eyes, a quite fascinating zombie novel, and The Golden, Shepard’s take on the vampire genre.

Dan Simmons writes novels in a number of genres, Science Fiction and Horror predominantly. I prefer his Science Fiction novels, but in the early days, after I was bowled over by his Hyperion Cantos, I tasted a few of his other novels.  Carrion Comfort draws its title from the poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins, but is in essence a vampire novel. Fires of Eden is set in Hawaii and centres on that island’s history and mythology.

The next novel by Michael Talbot is a beguiling, beautifully written vampire novel and is entitled The Delicate Dependency, A Novel of Vampire Life. I loved this novel when I first read it, and still occasionally reread it with pleasure. The edition is an Avon paperback published in 1982.

Evangeline Walton is best known for her sequence of books, retelling the Mabinogian, published in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the 1970s.  She also wrote several other novels, and Witch House is one of them. The edition below was published in 1991 by Collier Books.

Who Fears The Devil is a collection of short stories by Manly Wade Wellman, a prolific writer of horror, science fiction ,folk tales and true crime.

The edition below was published in 1975 by Star Books.

The final book in this collection of occult and horror fiction, is The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, published by Fawcett in 1976.

Coming next – something completely different.

Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series - Part 2

Here for you delectation are more covers from the fabulous Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

Firstly, Evangeline Walton's retelling of the Mabinogian in her series of four books.

Then there are the strange fantasies of E R Eddison. I haven't read any of these books for over 30 years so I can't remember much about their contents. The only image that has stayed with me through the years is Florinda (?) in Fish Dinner at Memison leaning forward and pricking the bubble of fantasy with a pin. Whether this is actually in the book or not, I can't say.

A few solitary novels from various authors...

One of the rarest of the Adult Fantasies is G K Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday - a bizarre novel involving anarchists and a secret society whose members are known by days of the week.

And Hope Mirrlees wonderful Lud-in-the Mist - a delightful fairy tale and her best known novel.

Enough for tonight, or else the post won't load from Live Writer which is my preferred way of composing blog entries these days.

There are more in this series to come...