Gerald Suster – The Devil’s Maze

Gerald Suster – The Devil’s Maze (Sphere, 1979)

 

With his death in November 1977, Dennis Wheatley left a vacancy for a new British dark master of Black Magic, and three of the applicants, as it were, were serious occultists turned pulp horror authors Jack Shackleford, Eric Erickson and Gerald Suster. The Devil’s Maze, Suster’s debut, has so far eluded me, but writing in the current Paperback Fanatic, Stephen Sennitt has no hesitation in proclaiming it Suster’s finest novel, a tribute to Arthur Machen which takes the Welsh mystic’s The Three Imposters as its inspiration.

William Hope Hodgson – The Boats Of The Glen Carrig

William Hope Hodgson – The Boats Of The Glen Carrig (Sphere, 1982)

Les Edwards

Hodgson’s first novel (1907), a Sc-Fi Horror hybrid, finds  Mariners adrift on the Sargasso sea in peril from murderous, stumpy armed and tentacled ‘Weed Devils’.

Richard Curtis – Squirm

Richard Curtis – Squirm (Sphere, 1976)

IT’S RAVENING, GUT- CHILLING, WORM-POWER — IN THE ALL-TIME HORROR CLASSIC!

Blurb:

“This was the night of crawling terror! SQUIRM is the blood-curdling shocker calculated to make you writhe with terror. A sleepy Southern town doesn’t know what’s hit it when a freak nightmare of a storm brings down the overhead electrical power lines which then direct a massive electrical charge into the wet mud. And that’s just the beginning. For the slimy, oozing, crawling horror which results – an angry rampaging mass of carnivorous superworms – is the most terrifying threat ever to be unleashed on (or under) the surface of the planet…”