Dark Carnival - With Signed Bookplate. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1947. First edition, limited to 3000 copies. Octavo. 313 pages. "The author's first book and his most representative story collection. Similar but not identical to the later collection The October Country" (Chalker 30).

    Contents: Horror Stories:Adept's gambit Man who never grew young Smoke ghost Automatic pistol Inheritance Hill and the hole Dreams of Albert Moreland Hound Diary in the snowGirl with the hungry eyesBit of the dark worldFantasy:The Sunken land (Fafhrd & Gray Mouser)

    

    A bed-ridden boy relies on his dog for contact with the outside world.Note: First published in Bradbury's collection Dark Carnival, Arkham House, 1947.

    But it is a find for the connoisseur, because it comprises a special brand of high-voltage horror story: the story of the vampire and of the undead--the unearthly being which is neither ghost nor living.There are twenty short stories, two long stories, and one novelette. There are classic writers: Gautier, Washington Irving, and Lafcadio Hearn. There are well-known modern authors such as Vincent Starrett, Helen R. Hull, August W. Derleth, and Edith Wharton. Others, like H. P. Lovecraft, are specialists in this particular type of horror story.Carmilla by J. Sheridan LeFanu is the classic vampire story. Shorter, but hardly less blood chilling, is Doom of the House of Duryea. Uncanonized is a werewolf story. The Feast in the Abbey and School for the Unspeakables contain the sinister elements of the Black Mass. The Tomb, one of Lovecraft's most famous, has a note of decadence and madness. Miss Mary Pask, by Edith Wharton, is a classic. Miss Blaisdell, the anthologist, has read several thousand stories in all and selected each in this collection for its particular appeal and excellence. For every selection there is an illustration by Miss Blaisdell.