50 great horror stories

"A story which has the power of evoking a sense of horror has always carried a strange fascination. By horror, as the editor points out, is meant not the horrible--the grisly detailing of gore and mayhem--but the horrific. And this embraces all those strange, unearthly events which since earliest times have surrounded man's life like a shadow, and which even in these enlightened, scientific days cannot always be convincingly dismissed. Reaction to the horrific comprises a number of different elements; wonder, fear, intense interest, and a combination of attraction and revulsion. It is still as though there is an element of the witch-doctor's acolyte in each of us. The editor has brought together in this volume fifty of the strangest horror stories of this and other ages. Here is the werewolf set on its sinister course, the Cambridge scholar sung to his own death by his dead colleagues, a lethal Apazauca spider stalking its human prey; here too, is a vampire not to be denied, the mournful spirit of a walled-up monk, and the hideous cries of zombies suddenly realizing they are dead. For all who still retain a sense of wonder about the strange, the weird, the hair-raising happenings which can never be satisfactorily explained, this book will prove irresistible"--Dust jacket.