AbeBooks: Tales from the Vault: Old-Fashioned Horror Books

Perhaps we should call this feature ‘Scary Tales from Another Era?’ We have delved deep into our vault (well, it’s actually an Internet database but vault sounds far scarier) and dusted off a selection of stories designed to chill the reader to the bone.

They were all published before 1960 and these books - some of them forgotten, many out-of-print - illustrate how authors and publishers tried to scare people in the days before JFK, The Beatles and everything else that came with the Swinging Sixties. You will find ghosts, monsters, witches, the undead, general strange happenings and a diverse range of supernatural elements in this selection. Some stories might not have aged as well as others – are tales of giant beetles and huge spiders really horrifying for a modern reader?

We have steered clear of the biggest names of horror from this pre-1960 era but there are plenty of authors that you will recognise like Dennis Wheatley, the Inkling Charles Williams, Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E Howard and the prolific Psycho author Robert Bloch.

Multiple titles from Arkham House in Sauk City, Wisconsin, a specialist publishing house that offers weird fiction, are included. Arkham House, named after Lovecraft’s fictional city, has been a horror institution since 1939.