When this longtime Modern Library favorite–filled with fifty-two stories of heart-stopping suspense–was first published in 1944, one of its biggest fans was critic Edmund Wilson, who in The New Yorker applauded what he termed a sudden revival of the appetite for tales of horror. Represented in the anthology are such distinguished spell weavers as Edgar Allen Poe ( The Black Cat ), Wilkie Collins ( A Terribly Strange Bed ), Henry James ( Sir Edmund Orme ), Guy de Maupassant ( Was It a Dream? ), O. Henry ( The Furnished Room ), Rudyard Kipling ( They ), and H.G. Wells ( Pollock and the Porroh Man ). Included as well are such modern masters as Algernon Blackwood ( Ancient Sorceries ), Walter de la Mare ( Out of the Deep ), E.M. Forster ( The Celestial Omnibus ), Isak Dinesen ( The Sailor-Boys Tale ), H.P. Lovecraft ( The Dunwich Horror ), Dorothy L. Sayers ( Suspicion ), and Ernest Hemingway ( The Killers ).
There is not a story in this collection that does not have the breath of life, achieve the full suspension of disbelief that is so particularly important in [this] type of fiction , wrote the Saturday Review. With an introduction and notes by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise.