Devils’ Spawn

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

An important, though neglected, figure in twentieth-century British horror fiction, Sir Charles Birkin (1907-1985) began his literary career as editor of the popular - and now highly collectible - Creeps series of horror anthologies in the 1930s, which featured tales by well-known writers such as H.R. Wakefield, Lord Dunsany and Russell Thorndike, as well as contributions by Birkin himself. A master of the conte cruel, often with a Grand Guignol finish, Birkin found true horror not in ghosts or the supernatural but in man’s inhumanity to man. Never before reprinted and extremely scarce, Devils’ Spawn (1936) collects sixteen of Birkin’s stories, many of them first published in the Creeps volumes, including the horror gems The Terror on Tobit and The Harlem Horror . Birkin’s collection The Smell of Evil (1965) is also available from Valancourt Books.

Not for the squeamish. Be warned, if you are at all sensitive, leave him well alone. - Hugh Lamb

More than a definite touch of the great master, Edgar Allan Poe. - Dennis Wheatley

Few writers of horror today approach the standards of Birkin. - Ulster Star