Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei

Fritz Leiber remarked "At the time that Lovecraft died, Donald Wandrei was the most natural successor to him that I could think of."

Robert Bloch called him "...on of the most important creative talents in the Lovecraft circle..."

Surpisingly, however, his work was out-of-print for many years, after his break with Arkham House in the aftermath of co-founder August Derleth. This 416-page tome includes stories originally published in venues including Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, Fantasy Magazine, Argosy, and Esquire; some from The Minnesota Quarterly, and a number of pieces never published before this book was assembled.

Here the reader can revel in the weird imagination of Donald Wandrei without collecting dozens of rare and scattered pulps or buying rare Arkham House volumes. Supplemented by non-fiction discussion by those who knew him, and introduced by the author's neighbor, Don't Dream complements Colossus (Wandrei's science fiction-- though the boundaries were fuzzy during the Golden Age!) to form a broad survey-- arguably the best of his fiction.

"The author's dark fantasies and horror tales, 26 in all and inspired by Poe, Baudelaire and Lovecraft, appear in this volume, which also includes 12 lush prose poems from Wandrei's youth and his evocative critical essay, 'The Imaginative Element in Modern Literature.' ...his nightmare landscapes, however, notably the time-regression story 'The Lives of Alfred Kramer' and the shuddery 'Strange Harvest, ' Wandrei's 'wizard imagery'--his own term--counterpoints his richly chosen language to call up sleep-haunting specters, malignantly glowing jewels and the ashen undead....When his work was at its fearsome peak, Wandrei was very, very scary indeed."

In 1939, Wandrei cofounded Arkham House to publish the work of H.P. Lovecraft. But he also was a writer of sf, horror, and fantasy for the pulp magazines Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. In a companion volume to Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (Fedogan & Bremer, 1989), editors Philip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler have rescued from obscurity Wandrei's published and unpublished horror and fantasy short fiction, prose poems, essays, and marginalia. Don't Dream contains traditional supernatural horror stories, lighthearted fantasy tales, non-science oriented science fiction, and his short "dream" mood pieces. While some of his pseudo-science is now dated, Wandrei's imaginative use of language renders his fiction worthy of new reading 60 years after it was first published. Highly recommended...