S. T. Joshi

The six volumes in the Black Wings series, from which these "Best of" tales are selected, stand as a monument to H. P. Lovecraft's incalculable and unassailable influence on contemporary weird fiction, and so the time seemed right for a retrospective volume that exhibits the choicest items from the series. The task of selection was not a simple or straightforward one, for every tale in the series had some claim to be chosen; let it then be said that...

Atheism has been on the rise in the West for several decades, but its roots, including those belonging to secularism, agnosticism, and freethought, run deep in Western history, philosophy, and thought. Drawing on a multitude of sources from a number of disciplines, S. T. Joshi outlines the natural origins of religious belief in primitive times and charts the slow development of secular accounts of natural phenomena in the Greco-Roman world. Adopting...

When 22-year-old Alison Mannering returns to her home in northeastern Pennsyl-vania after college, she finds a troubling situation. Her father, Guy Mannering, a longtime coal miner, has died recently under suspicious circumstances, and her mother refuses to provide any details of his passing. Alison feels she has no option but to investigate the matter herself, enlisting her high school sweetheart, Randy Kroeber, as well as Randy s twin sister, Andrea...

From the masters of the genre, 14 spellbinding tales written between 1880 and 1940, including "The Sin Eater," by Fiona McLeod, a wild Celtic fantasy, "The Eye Above the Mantel," by Frank Belknap Long, as well as works by Ambrose Bierce, R. H. Barlow, Arthur Machen, W. C. Morrow and others.

The author writes: This book began as an expansion of my essay, "H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West," in The Weird Tale, but very quickly became something quite different, to the degree that the two works have little save the title in common. I have always been interested in Lovecraft the philosopher, and in my Starmont Reader's Guide to Lovecraft (1982) I attempted a very compressed account of his philosophical views. To treat so complex a...

The six volumes in the Black Wings series, from which these "Best of" tales are selected, stand as a monument to H. P. Lovecraft's incalculable and unassailable influence on contemporary weird fiction, and so the time seemed right for a retrospective volume that exhibits the choicest items from the series. The task of selection was not a simple or straightforward one, for every tale in the series had some claim to be chosen; let it then be said that...

This original anthology presents 19 short stories that cover nearly a century of speculative fiction by women authors. Selections range from Mary Shelley's "Transformation" (1830), a pendant to Frankenstein in its themes and motifs, to "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched" (1922) by May Sinclair, a tale of time travel that follows its heroine to Hell and back. Gripping narratives include Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House," in which a ghostly couple revisit...