John Blackburn – Broken Boy (Sphere, 1970)

John Blackburn – Broken Boy (Sphere, 1970)

Blurb:
Ritual Murder
The horribly mutilated corpse which the police dragged from the river was identified by British Intelligence. It appeared to be that of Gerda Raine, onetime agent of East Germany, who traded missile secrets for asylum in the West.

General Kirk was afraid that a foreign. power had set up a murder organisa­tion to operate in the British Isles.

Before long he was wishing it was only that.

 

Graham Masterton – Famine

Graham Masterton – Famine  (Sphere, 1981, 1988)

Blurb:
FAMINE
When the grain crop failed in Kansas it seemed like an isolated incident and no one took much notice. Except Ed Hardesty. Then the blight spread to California’s fruit harvest, and from there, like wildfire, throughout the nation.
FAMINE
A tidal wave of terror
FAMINE
Suddenly America woke up to the fact that her food supplies were almost wiped out. Her grain reserves lethally polluted. And Botulism was multiplying at a horrifying rate…

The Best Of Fritz Leiber

The Best Of Fritz Leiber  (Sphere, 1974).

Introduction

Sanity    
Wanted – An Enemy    
The Man Who Never Grew Young    
The Ship Sails at Midnight
The Enchanted Forest
Coming Attraction
Poor Superman
A Pail of Air
The Foxholes of Mars    
The Big Holiday    
The Night He Cried    
The Big Trek    
Space-Time for Springers    
Try and Change the Past    
A Deskful of Girls    
Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee    
Little Old Miss Macbeth    
Mariana    
The Man Who Made Friends With Electricity    
The Good New Days    
Gonna Roll the Bones    
America the Beautiful    

Bibliography

Blurb:
Fritz Leiber began writing science fiction in the 1940s and, to the delight of his fans, is still going strong. Perhaps best known for his Big Time series and the Hugo and Nebula awards winner Gonna Roll The Bones, Leiber succeeds in blending fantasy and science fiction in superbly readable fashion. This collection of twenty-two short stories is intended to demonstrate the development of his fascinating talent.

The collection includes

Gonna Roll The Bones – Joe Slattermill knew he could roll dice better than any man in Night Town. But then he played against the Big Gambler.
The Big Trek – He didn’t know where he was or how he got there. But he did know he shouldn’t be able to
understand the creatures he met.
Mariana – She flicked a switch that turned off the world . . . and the last one had her name on it.

This anthology includes a bibliography and an introduction by Fritz Leiber.

John Stockholm – Succubus

John Stockholm – Succubus (Sphere 1985)

Cover illustration: Kevin Tweddell

Blurb:

Succubus: n. a fiend or devil who assumes female form and in such guise consorts wickedly with the souls of sleeping men

Uncanny things began to happen to Peter Conway almost as soon as he set foot in the remote Cornish village of Penthor. First there was the shipwreck, those two rotting corpses alongside the perfectly preserved body of the sea´s third victim. Then there was the beautiful, mauve-eyed woman whom he had greedily watched making love on the cliff-top, her aura of erotic energy seemingly reaching out to flicker all around him. And there was the reunion with his old friend Andrew, long devoted to other-worldly pursuits, who in the few short years since he had last seen him had aged by a quarter-century or more.

Yes, he thought with a shudder, there was in Penthor an unmistakable sense of evil, spiced with the heady, musky scent of forbidden lusts and passions. And even as he pondered on what he had seen, Penthor´s macabre miasma was sucking him in, enticing him deeper and deeper into the a dark and fearsome mystery enshrouded in necromancy, terror and death …

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein [#39]  (Sphere, 1976)

Blurb:
“I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of a man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes and I felt a faintness seize me.’

Such is Dr Frankenstein’s horrified reaction to the sudden encounter with the monster he has created. Filled with remorse at the ghastly results of his experiment, he feels that he must make amends…

Frankenstein is Volume 39 in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult