If these were depicting scenes from the actual stories, what on earth must such gems as Death Calls From The Madhouse and Thirst Of The Ancients be like to read? The answer, when I eventually found out, was that they're pretty much the equivalent of the video nasty: shocking in their day, but nothing much to trouble the censors in 2006. I first became a Murgunstrummpet when I picked up a copy of Peter Haining's Terror! A History Of Horror Illustrations From The Pulp Magazines (Sphere, 1978) and was captivated by the John Newton Howitt covers for Horror Stories, Terror Tales etc. As he explains in his foreword, Cave (1910-2004) commendably resisted the temptation to revise, clean up or otherwise interfere with the stories, so what you get are the warts-and-all originals in all their hideous glory. Pure, unashamed pulp primarily culled from Cave's work for Weird Tales in the 'thirties with a smattering of his 'shudder pulps' to spice things up. Haunted houses, ravenous vampires, slobbering monsters, fiends human and inhuman, nights dark and stormy, corpses fresh and rotting. Some of the most grisly and chilling horror stories ever to appear in the pulps are collected here.
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