Return From the Grave
Description
Hardcover – Published in 1976 by W. H. Allen.
It is midnight, that time when the dead return to torment the living. As you stand alone in the graveyard and the last chimes of the clock fade away, you hear other sounds. The movement of damp earth, the creak of coffrn lids, perhaps a faint rattle of bones. And then maybe, something else—yes, footsteps—coming nearer, nearer…
This is Return From The Grave, Hugh Lamb’s latest anthology of tales by masters of the macabre. The graves which bring forth their dead in these twenty midnight stories are both those in the tales, and the unknown graves where the stones themselves have lain forgotten for many years. For above all, these are rare stories, resurrected after many years of neglect and brought back to print in a remarkable literary excavation of the tombs of macabre fiction.
There are rare stories from such giants as Edgar Allan Poe and August Derleth; forgotten classic tales from H. R. Wakefield, Frederick Cowles, A. C. Benson, R.H. Benson, Eleanor Scott, Arthur Porges and R. Murray Gilchrist. And, after an equally rewarding visit to the maternity ward of tales of terror, five unpublished stories by Ramsey Campbell, Rosemary Timperley, John Blackburn, Eddy C. Bertin and Robert Haining.
Return From The Grave means many things to many people. Here it means, for Edgar Allan Poe, an Egyptian mummy brought back to life; for Maurice Level, it means the dreadful power over the living of the memory of the dead; to August Derleth, it is an appalling vision of that mental crypt, the subconscious; for H. R. Wakefield, it is the terrrfying ghost, in a haunted lodging house.
In this anthology, there are twenty ways of describing Return From The Grave. For the reader, they all mean the same thing—sheer terror…
Contents
Editor’s Foreword – Hugh Lamb
Waxworks – W. L. George
Ingredient X – H. R. Wakefield
In the Tomb – Arthur Porges
Roxana Runs Lunatick – R. Murray Gilchrist
The Sistrum – Alice Perrin
The Coffin of Lissa – August Derleth
The Slype House – A. C. Benson
The Watcher – R. H. Benson
The Other Woman – Rosemary Timperley
Snow Time – Oswell Blakeston
The Tower of Moab – L. A. Lewis
Blue Eyes – Maurice Level
In the Shadows – Ramsey Campbell
Some Words with a Mummy – Edgar Allan Poe
Dad – John Blackburn
Composed of Cobwebs – Eddy C. Bertin
Death in the Well – Frederick Cowles
Legion of Evil – Warden Ledge
The Wall – Robert Haining
At Simmel Acres Farm – Eleanor Scott
Praise
“Hugh Lamb is a literary archaeologist who devotes his time to perusing old magazines, mostly of the 19th century, and long-out-of-print books in search or stories of the macabre. The latest of his many anthologies of such exhumed material, Return from the Grave, is another treasure trove of supernatural terror by authors who, in the main, have been undeservedly forgotten.
Of course, Poe’s Some Words with a Mummy obviously would be an early candidate for this collection. but who has heard of such tales as The Slype House and The Watcher by the brothers A. C. and R. H. Benson? Or for that matter, Alice Perrin’s eerie The Sistrum?
Well, here in this casket are a number or such goosefleshers which, themselves, have returned from the mouldy vaults of literary oblivion, thanks to the efforts of a superb resurrection man, Hugh Lamb.”
LA Herald Examiner
April 1977
Other Editions
Hardcover – Published by Taplinger in 1977
