Best of
Horror

1967

Rosemary's Baby


Ira Levin - 1967
    But by the time Rosemary discovers the horrifying truth, it may be far too late!

Rosemary’s Baby


Roman Polański - 1967
    Things become frightening as Rosemary begins to suspect her unborn baby isn't safe around their strange neighbors.

The Other Side of the Mountain


Michel Bernanos - 1967
    

The Season to Be Wary


Rod Serling - 1967
    Winner of six Emmys (he was nominated nine times), two Sylvania Awards, on Peabody Award, and one Christopher Award for his teleplays, Serling came as close as anyone to dominating an era that abounded with talented men. His plays "Requiem for a Heavyweight" and "Patterns" are usually the first items on the lips of television aficionados reminiscing about the good old days. Yet as television changed, Rod Serling kept pace. He became producer and chief writer for the famous "Twilight Zone" series. These bizarre and fantastic adventures into the occult and demonic were without doubt one of the most creative, imaginative and successful enterprises in the history of television.Now Rod Serling has applied his prodigious writing talents to a new medium: one in which he is perhaps destined to make his greatest mark. The three novellas that compromise THE SEASON TO BE WARY betray the skillful hand of a master storyteller and prose stylist. Fired with a savage yet disciplined irony, paced with deliberate cadence that rises to a starting denouement, each story explores the theme of a terrible vengeance delivered for terrible deeds performed.In "The Escape Route," ex-Gruppenfuehrer Joseph Strobe - ex-deputy assistant commander of Auschwitz, ex-confidant of Heinrich Himmler - putters about his little rathole in Buenos Aires chewing over the good times he had breaking Jews. Yet his snug little world is turned upside down b the capture of Adolf Eichmann, and Strobe soon finds himself on the wrong end of a terrifying hunt."Color Scheme" recounts the life and times of the great King Connacher, racist and rabble-rouser, who makes his living on the stump, preaching the lynching gospel, only to find himself one summer evening the victim of an extraordinary case of mistaken identity.In "Eyes," Miss Claudia Menlo, who in her fifty lifeless years has been denied nothing that she wanted - except her sight - manipulates people with the same purposeful indifference with which she fondles the expensive bric-a-brac in her lavishly cluttered dwelling. Yet her insistant will is brutally thwarted by the one set of circumstances she cannot control.Serling has infused these simple, forceful tales with an extraordinary richness of character and detail. There is, for example, the Prussian officer Gruber, who cannot stomach the pigs like Strobe he helped create and with whom he is forced to share his guilt. And there is Indian Charlie Hatcher, the most memorable portrait of a burned-out prizefighter since Serling's own justly famous Mountain Rivera.The power, the drive, the complexity and subtlety of these novellas mark Rod Serling as one of the most important and graceful fiction writers. Mr. Serling is a graduate of Antioch College and lives in Southern California with his wife and two children.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream


Harlan Ellison - 1967
    This edition contains the original introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and the original foreword by Harlan Ellison, along with a brief update comment by Ellison that was added in the 1983 edition. Among Ellison's more famous stories, two consistently noted as among his very best ever are the title story and the volume's concluding one, Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.Since Ellison himself strongly resists categorization of his work, we won't call them science fiction, or SF, or speculative fiction or horror or anything else except compelling reading experiences that are sui generis. They could only have been written by Harlan Ellison and they are incomparably original.CONTENTS"I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream""Big Sam Was My Friend""Eyes of Dust""World of the Myth""Lonelyache""Delusion for Dragonslayer""Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes"

Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense


Alfred Hitchcock - 1967
    Tennyson Jesse"Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper" by Robert Bloch"The Treasure Hunt" by Edgar Wallace"The Man Who Knew How" by Dorothy L. Sayers"The Dilemma of Grampa DuBois" by Clayre and Michel Lipman "P. Moran, Diamond-Hunter" by Percival Wilde

Unholy Trinity


Ray Russell - 1967
    Contains three Gothic novellas: "Sanguinarius," "Sardonicus," and "Sagittarius," plus author's introduction entitled "The Haunted Castle: A Confession."

The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce


Ernest Jerome Hopkins - 1967
    L. Mencken called these "some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language." This edition includes eight hundred newly discovered definitions.Bierce was a contemporary of Mark Twain, and his work resembled Twain’s, if perhaps filtered through Edgar Allan Poe. Through sardonic interpretations of even the most innocuous of words, Bierce savagely but hilariously exposes the dark side of society and its conventions. The book earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce” but also lasting acclaim. Less than a decade after The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce mysteriously disappeared in Mexico while covering the Mexican Revolution and was never heard from again.