“#9 Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. Like John Franklin Bardin [The Deadly Percheron], Fressier takes a screwball situation and adroitly twists it into something evil.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
“#11 Torture Garden. Fin-de-siecle decadence at its best. At one time one of those ‘suppressed’ books and now chiefly remembered as one of Frank Frazetta’s better paperback covers”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine 1983)
“#6 The Crooked Hinge. Sometimes Carr actually did use the supernatural in his detective novels, sometimes he only seemed to do so. The Crooked Hinge does not turn out to be a ghost story, but that won’t spare your nerves.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
“#4 Dark Sanctuary. This begins routinely enough- an occult investigator is called in to slay an ancestral curse in a gloomy castle- then takes off to become a 1930s version of Blish’s Black Easter. Perhaps the best of the British thrillers.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
Maker Of Shadows by Jack Mann (2012, Ramble House) “#6 Maker of Shadows. The best of Mann’s “Gees” series, most of which are very good indeed. Gees was a private investigator whose cases often involved…
“#10 Figers of Fear. This one has it all: lycanthropy, vampirism, family curse, patricide, incest, infanticide, hauntings, the works. Supposedly it was marketed as straight detective fiction. Must have freaked out the Agatha Christie fans.”
“#3 Vampires Overhead. Civilization is destroyed again, this time by a bizarre migration of a life-form from outer space. A strange and effective between-the-wars British thriller.”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Science Fiction Horror Novels (1983, Twilight Zone Magazine)
“#12 Echo of a Curse. Undeservedly forgotten, Ms. Ryan was the best of the British Thriller writers- a group who wrote popular fiction for the lending libraries, roughly parallel to the pulp writers in America between the world wars. This novel of lycanthropy and vampirism rates with Fingers of Fear as one of the best.”
“#6 The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck. Disturbing mystery involving madness and genetic abnormalities.”
Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Science Fiction Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
“#11 Doctors Wear Scarlet. Is it vampirism of is it a neurotic obsession? Ask the dead. Superb modern vampire novel was filmed as Incense for the Damned (AKA Bloodsuckers)”
-Karl Edward Wagner, “The Thirteen Best Supernatural Horror Novels” (Twilight Zone Magazine, 1983)
