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.

    found in a bottle;A descent into the maelström;The thousand-and-second tale of Scheherezade;Mellonta tauta;The assignation;Ligeia;The fall of the House of Usher;The masque of the red death;The system of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether;The devil in the belfry;X-ing a paragrab;The sphinx;The imp of the perverse;William Wilson;The facts in the case of M. Valdemar;The man of the crowd;Berenice;The tell-tale heart;The cask of Amontillado;Hop-frog;The pit and the pendulum;The black cat.