TALES OF THE OCCULT

The authors collected here should know about the occult—nearly all of them are dead. But to the credit of the editors of this shoestring (dead authors=much public domain work=low royalties) anthology, mixed among the very moldy and familiar chestnuts (Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, W.F. Harvey's August Heat) are some rarities: H.G. Wells' life-after-death tale, Under the Knife; Arthur Conan Doyle's personality-transfer story, The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and little-collected tales from August Derleth, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Editor Asimov contributes a forgettable introduction and, to each tale, a slightly more useful afterword discussing the tale's theme (22 themes—"Evil Eye," "Exorcism," "Soul Travel," etc.—with one story per theme). Overall, an anthology of interest primarily to occult-fiction completists.