I think there’s something about October that drives publishers to repackage classic horror tales for a new generation.

Earlier this week we looked at Leslie S. Klinger’s new anthology In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, which collects tales published between 1816-1914; today it’s D. Thin’s handsome new book from New York Review Book Classics, Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird, published on October 6th. It collects tales from roughly the same era, 1833-1927, all with the theme of the cosmically weird.

“The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” —H. P. Lovecraft

This collection features some of the greatest masters of extreme terror, among them Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, and Henry James, and includes such classic works as Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” and of course Lovecraft’s own weird and hideous “The Colour Out of Space.”

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle”
Bram Stoker, “The Squaw”
Ambrose Bierce, “Moxon’s Master”
Ambrose Bierce, “The Damned Thing”
Ambrose Bierce, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”
R. W. Chambers, “The Repairer of Reputations”
M. P. Shiel, “The House of Sounds”
Arthur Machen, “The White People”
Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows”
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner”
Walter de la Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt”
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”
A Note on the Selection by D. Thin

New York Review Book (NYRB) Classics also published William Sloane’s The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror on October 6th — definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in classic horror tales.

Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird was published by New York Review Book Classics on October 6, 2015. It is 368 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is uncredited, but it sure looks like Charles Burns to me.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.