BookList - Ray Olson
R. Dixon Smith explains in his introduction to this perhaps last collection of tales by one of the longtime contributors to the famous pulp fiction magazine, "Weird Tales", that the book had been accepted for publication by Arkham House just before its founder, August Derleth, died in 1971. The volume's 15 stories trade in the ghosts, doppelgangers, accursed treasures, and baleful extraterrestrials that were and pretty much continue to be staples of the horror genre, and Jacobi, under the influence of "Weird Tales"' grand master, H. P. Lovecraft, occasionally playfully anchored his imaginings in the "scholarship" of learned tomes that he made up for the occasion. Horror fans who like such tricks as much as they like the bargain-basement prose of the genre's pulp heyday (Jacobi's at least as good, if not as jokey, as Robert ["Psycho"] Bloch) will be happy to find this book on their libraries' shelves.