Dark Harvest, 1986, with art by the great J.K. Potter. This is an odd volume, somewhat akin to the split LPs punk bands used to do: half the stories are by Campbell, and half by Grant. Dark Harvest was based in Niles, Illinois, where I spent summers as a kid in the 1980s. It’s odd to think they were publishing top notch horror fiction in a town I always regarded as kind of dull.
TOR, 1987. A reprint of this 1978 novel (variant cover here) about Grant's fictional town of Oxrun Station, Conn. I had to look the Charleston Evening Post up; apparently they are one of the constituents of the Post & Courier.
TOR, 1986. A tale of suburban paranoia and supernatural murder, with a cover embossed to perfection.
Arkham House, 1981. I got this so long ago I can't remember where I found it. Fans of Sepultura may recognize the cover.
Daw Books, 1977. From Baskets Books again. Daw published this series annually between 1971 and 1994. This volume has stories by Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Joseph Payne Brennan, Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee, and others.
Charles L. Grant was an important figure in the horror fiction boom of the 1980s; this 1978 novel set in the fictional town of Oxrun Station, Conn., helped make him one of the more prominent of the new horror authors of the time.
Grant was a practitioner of what he called "quiet horror," and this tale of cultists and sinister missing library books fits that description. I'm having a hard time imagining the Courant's book critic writing anything with an exclamation point, but that's what review blurb punctuation does.
