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.

Science Fiction 26 – Lucius Shepard, Kathleen M Sidney, Robert Silverberg & Clifford D Simak.

First up for this entry is Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime, one of three Shepard novels in my collection. I also have his vampire novel, The Golden and Green Eyes, his take on zombies, but they are on another shelf which I’ll get around to eventually.

Who, you may well ask, is Kathleen M Sidney? I’m afraid there is very little information on her or her book Michael and the Magic Man, so I’ll just have to rely on the blurb on the back of the book to give an idea of its contents.

It says:
”When Earth was invaded nobody knew it.

Nobody but the Magic Man and Michael, a few footloose psychics in a supersleek van, driving through a fantastic American dreamscape in a nonstop, cross-country war with a mind bending Power from beyond the stars”

Sounds like hippie science fiction to me, and the cover does nothing to disabuse one of this notion.

Robert Silverberg has written many novels, but I appear to have only two of them – Lord Valentine’s Castle and Nightwings.

And lastly for this entry, Clifford D Simak’s wonderful City, where intelligent dogs and robots end up running the earth after man becomes obsolescent.

Next – Dan Simmons