The best story here is 'The Birth' a truly weird and creepy story of post-mortal rebirth and parasitism that loses its punch at the last moment with a descent into 'came the dawn' cliche. Which is not to say that there aren't some genuinely horrific moments in here, shot through with a kind of black humour that feels both dated and charming despite being a little hammy, a lot like British sex-comedies from the same era. And for all that literary snobs find fault with Lovecraft's prose or some of his worldviews, his brand of cosmic horror gave a genre that was largely absorbed in revenants of the past a chilling new forward- and outward-looking focus. For a collection released in the 70s, it draws so much on traditional supernatural story tropes that I found myself wondering whether, in the balance, the splatterpunks didn't actually do the genre more good than harm by updating the genre's terms of enfearment. I've also enjoyed some of his own stories.īut this collection, like a 60s/70s British horror film, tends towards the hokey yet endearing rather than the enduringly terrifying. I've enjoyed several anthologies that he edited, especially the wonderfully creepy Welsh Tales Of Terror. I had a lot of goodwill towards Chetwynd-Hayes when I cracked open this slim volume with its obscure Amicus anthology-film tie-in cover.
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