Hugh B. Cave (1910–2004)

Super creepy collection of [a:Hugh B. Cave|8637|Hugh B. Cave|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1288993349p2/8637.jpg]'s best horror stuff. Certainly the best collection of Cave I have ever seen, hardly a clinker in the batch. On the more grue side of the pulp era and not as polished as other pulp writers but this is made up for in the creepiness and excitement of these stories. Excellent gruesome illustrations by Lee Brown Coye just improves the look and feel of the stories. Really a beautiful edition.

Carcosa Press only released 4 books in it's short lifetime, this was the first. Hard to find in first edition but fortunately reprinted in a trade edition (I think it is the only Carcosa title ever reprinted). Not sure if the reprint includes the original illustrations, but still worth picking up even without these.

I tended to rate books too high in the past but this is a definite five stars even on reappraisal.… (more)

I would say that Hugh B. Cave was not a great innovator, but a solid and capable writer in the terse pulp fiction style. His fiction consists of vampires, voluptuous women, men of action, and the mad. His writing reminds one of pulp era tales of the criminal underworld, with quick paced action, smoking revolvers, and fists connecting squarely with jaws, but his antagonists tend to the supernatural and science fictional rather than your run-of-the-mill gangsters and gun molls. All in all an enjoyable collection of pulp horror tales.… (more)