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synopsis

Some books should never be opened. Each step leads further down a dark road, past the skull-shaped sign pointing the way to Club Satan: The Tavern Grotesque; past the strangely menacing aquarium, which looms like an open grave; making its way to the statue-lined garden where a black-clad woman waits, her face — and her secret — obscured by a veil.
       This massive collection, edited and introduced by the late John Pelan, firmly establishes Carl Jacobi as one of the great writers of weird fiction. Story after story — and there are sixty of them here — reads like a nightmare you’d had years before: a nightmare you’d forgotten having but that hasn’t forgotten about you.
       It opens with the classic story “The Unpleasantness at Carver House.” The tale begins in the aftermath of an accident, as the narrator carries his injured sister home. A sheriff stops by, asking nosy questions, but he isn’t the only unexpected guest. It’s a stunning, vertiginous read, and a masterpiece of unreliable narration.
       “The Elcar Special” is a gloriously dark dream of a tale. In it, a man who helps maintain classic cars learns the strange ways in which the future can reach back into the past; read it and you might find your hands shaking the next time you get behind the wheel. Just as intriguing is “Mive,” in which a solitary walker finds himself drawn to the edge of a swamp, where he comes across a huge, ebony butterfly, and where he confronts the hazy line between reality and delirium.
       In “The Monument,” a sculptor is tasked with attending a funeral, observing the dead woman as she lay in her coffin, and creating a life-sized monument, to be placed at the head of her grave. Surprising himself, he decides to complete the final touches at the gravesite itself, but what he carves turns out to be not what he’d intended.
       “The art of killing a person has certainly developed,” observes the narrator of “A Pair of Swords.” He, along with others, is touring a gallery lavished with ancient treasures. The guide is droning learnedly on when the narrator feels a tap on his shoulder. A stranger asks if he would step into another room and help settle a matter of honor.
       Time and again, Jacobi’s protagonists find themselves swept out of their depth and into deep waters. Dread descends, the dread you might feel standing at the edge of a cliff as the ground begins to crumble away beneath you. But it’s worse: it’s as if the familiar floor of your living room had suddenly given way, revealing a dark and intricate landscape you had never imagined lay beneath your feet.
       There’s a reason Stephen King called the author “one of the finest writers to come out of the Golden Age of Fantasy.” This monumental collection, bookended by Pelan’s detailed introduction. D.H. Olson’s moving obituary, and a bonus essay by Robert Bloch, is a cause for celebration. Finally, the devil’s been given his due.

The volume has been edited by John Pelan. The series editor for the Library of Weird Fiction is S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012).