Since reading Stephen King's [Danse Macabre], I've been trying to find the authors and books he mentions in an effort to read more of the foundational horror writing available. Many years back, after my first reading of Uncle Stevie's treatise on horror, I read up on some of the biggies, but not the deeper mentions. This collection featured several of the authors Uncle Stevie mentions - [[Isaac Bashevis Singer]], [[Ray Bradbury]], [[Tanith Lee]], [[Isaac Asimov]], [[Robert Bloch]], and [[Fritz Leiber Jr.]]. And there are many stories within that were a joy to read. My only quibble might be the over inclusion of fantasy stories of the sword and sorcerer ilk, to the exclusion of such supernatural beings in more contemporary settings.

One surprise was Singer's The Witch, which opened the book. Kaye lists some biographical notes about the author or the stories before each entry, and I learned that Singer was a Nobel winner - a rare thing for anyone writing anything approaching horror. This story focuses on a Jewish story of obsessive love brought on by witchery.

[[H. G. Wellls]]' story The Magic Shop was a simple tale of magic, all the more enjoyable for its simplicity. Seems as though the blood and gore of modern horror looses the macabre in favor of carnage.

Bradbury's The Traveler belongs with the collection of stories you'll find in [From the Dust Returned] but, sadly, you won't find it there. It follows Cecil, a being who can inhabit any person or animal. It's easily one of Bradbury's best in that set, but was not included in the more modern collection of stories about the weird family.

[[Jack Snow]]'s Dark Music is a wonderful and engrossing tale of a man seeking for an Eden to rest. When he finds it on his family's unused forested property, there is someone else living there - and the squatter is hiding a dark secret.

Bloch's offering, The Chaney Legacy takes us to old Hollywood, and the secret behind Lon Chaney's eerie inhabitance of all his characters. It's one of only two noir stories in the collection and a highlight.

[[Alvin Vogel]] writes a deeply imagined detective story, The Party Animal, about private magic investigators. The world building in such a small space is first-rate. Harry Dresden owes a lot to this story.

Emma's Daughter by [[Alan Rodgers]] will just make your skin crawl in all its zombie glory - The Walking Dead got nothin' on this one.

Lovecraft is here, too, with an uncompleted manuscript that was finished by August Derleth, who founded Arkham Publishing House - the great classic horror purveyors. Witches' Hollow has what you'd expect from a Lovecraft creation, but the effect isn't diminished by the expectation.

All in all, this was a wonderful, if sometimes uneven, collection. And who wouldn't want to own a book with Edward Gorey cover art. ( )

A collection of forty-one short stories, Witches and Warlocks features tales of people dealing in the supernatural, or having magical power, inflicting curses, etc. There are fortune-tellers and magicians, enchanted objects and magic potions, dealings with the devil, mysterious beings and monsters, even spiritual guides which aren't malevolent at all etc. There's even a few zombie stories (the most disturbing of all, I found, was "Emma's Daughter", of a woman who insisted her recently-deceased child be brought back to life). There were lots of authors whose names I recognized- Isaac Asimov, Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, H.G. Wells; as well as many others I never heard of. I was actually surprised how much I liked reading them all, as such dark stories aren't my usual fare.

So here you'll find amusing stories, some clever ones, a few little mysteries. There were some that simply didn't make any sense to me at all, like the one about the man who tied pipes onto bat's wings and then controlled them to create eerie music in the air? or "The Song of the Morrow" by Robert Louis Stevenson, which I just could not make heads or tails of. Some of these stories are quite long, even divided up into little chapters of their own, as it were. Others are only a page or two. I found that most of the shorter stories didn't work well for me, they just felt too incomplete.

My two favorite stories were "The Fisherman and His Soul" by Oscar Wilde and "The Tiger's Eye" by Frank L. Baum. In Wilde's story, a fisherman falls in love with a mermaid, and a witch tells him that to join her in the sea he must cast away his soul. So he does, and his soul wanders off in the world alone, each year coming back begging the fisherman to let them be one again, telling marvelous tales of wonders he's seen to tempt him. The ending quite surprised me. "The Tiger's Eye" features a tiger family on an exotic island; a baby tiger is born missing an eye and his parents force a magician to turn himself into an eye for the cub. But the eye still holds the magician's consciousness, and full of anger he fills the young tiger with maliciousness, causing it to rampage through the forest. Eventually the other animals get tired of his destruction and band together to destroy the rouge tiger. Of course the magician in the eye doesn't want to die, so he has further plans....

from the Dogear Diary ( )

Kaye's Witches and Warlocks anthology, featuring a story by Asimov, is not Asimov's Young Witches and Warlocks anthology. Shame on me for confusing them when I visited the library intending to find the latter and brought the former home instead.

Kaye's anthology is markedly lurid. After finding that the first few stories were focused around the topics of sex and hellfire, I skipped around and only read the stories by the authors I was interested in. By and large, I could have lived without reading them, but there were a few I felt worth the effort of tracking down.

Wells' "The Magic Shop" couldn't hold my interest. Bradbury's "The Traveler" was an excellent October Country tale, and I'm surprised that it wasn't included in the October Country collection. Pinkwater's "Wizard Crystal" was only mildly exciting; I prefer his humorous works. Lee's "Perfidious Amber" was a bit of mystery story and not one of her best. Baum's "The Tiger's Eye" was perhaps even better that Bradbury's story and one that I'm glad I read, and not just for this quote:

"Not willingly," admitted the tiger. "But here is the alternative; either you transform yourself into an eye for our child, or I and my dear wife will tear you into shreds." (Guild America Books, no ISBN, pp. 212-213)

Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is so frequently anthologized that there was little pleasure in finding it here. Asimov's "The Up-to-Date Sorcerer" was not at all to my taste. Lovecraft's "Witches' Hollow" (completed by August Derleth) was pretty bland. Stevenson's "The Song of the Morrow" started of promisingly but ended rather flat. The Appendices contained some interesting information, however. ( )

no cover, black and blue