Short Story Wednesday: HAUNTINGS edited by Henry Mazzeo (illustrated by Edward Gorey)

This book can be read here, at the Internet Archive (sadly denuded of its jacket).

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:

Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo
"The Lonesome Place" by August Derleth
"In the Vault" by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Man Who Collected Poe" by Robert Bloch
"Where Angels Fear" by Manly Wade Wellman
"Lot No. 249" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Haunted Dolls’ House" by M. R. James
"The Open Door" by Mrs. Oliphant
"Thus I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier
"Levitation" by Joseph Payne Brennan
"The Ghostly Rental" by Henry James
"The Face" by E. F. Benson
"The Whistling Room" by William Hope Hodgson
"The Grey Ones" by J. B. Priestley
"The Stolen Body" by H. G. Wells
"The Red Lodge" by H. Russell Wakefield
"The Visiting Star" by Robert Aickman
"Midnight Express" by Alfred Noyes

This might be one of  the most important books to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).

This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells.

Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection Delight, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his Mapp & Lucia comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.

And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone. This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973...I shall have to seek out those reviews [and have, below]...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

And looking at the book at the Internet Archive let me see, for the first time in years (decades?) that Mazzeo thanks prolific (and often horror-fiction) anthologist Seon Manley (usually in tandem with her sister, GoGo Lewis) for assistance on this, again possibly only book. He asked the right editor, clearly.

Further appreciations: 

Gahan Wilson in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1969 (Joanna Russ also has reviews in this issue, just before Wilson's occasional column about horror fiction and related matter, "The Dark Corner").

Fritz Leiber in Fantastic, September 1973 (page 110), published around the time I found the book...

And please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's short stories...