Simply put: an essential survey/guide to the 1926-1936 era of (mainly) American sf. Bleiler has read _everything_ published in the magazines during this time period, gives a synopsis of the story, offers historical notes, and quite often comments on the importance (or lack thereof) of the story. David H. Keller comes in for some deadly bone-crushing comments. Bleiler has also tracked down biographical information, going so far as to search Social Security death records. And there's much more, far too much to list here.

Having read a fair number of these stories, his comments are quite accurate (most of what was published by Gernsback is awful dreck, but there were a few important stories published too).

If you have any interest in the this early era of SF this is an essential book for the shelf. And it's fun to read the plot summaries of some absolutely dreadful stories!

Nonminated for the 1999 Hugo for Best Related Book (previously the Non-Fiction category).

This book interestingly delves into ghost stories that were published in magazines in the Victorian era. Reprinting them allows one to see the historical and cultural influences that were prominent at the time, such as the development of a mass-capitalist economic system in Victorian England. The stories are not necessarily scary in a traditional sense but more intellectual and historical.

I have not yet read all of the novellas in this volume; in fact, I have only read one so far, but it was excellent, and the others appear to be of the same quality after thumbing through them. The one I did read was "The Ghost of Guir House" by a 19th-Century American writer named Charles Willing Beale. It is truly bizarre. It begins with the narrator recounting his horseback journey in a remote neck of the woods one twilight, a journey which leads him to stumble onto this old rotting mansion. Yeah, good stuff, right? He meets this beautiful, ethereal girl who takes him inside the house and introduces him to her father. The descriptions of the interior of this creepy house are just classic, archetypal haunted-house type stuff. The father and daughter talk about themselves and slowly reveal their really weird secret--which is not exactly a dark or horrifying secret, rather a mind-boggling one. I won't give it away here but it has to do with rips in the fabric of time and other dimensions intruding onto this one. Really unexpected ending which leaves you sort of flabbergasted, but an enormously entertaining story which makes perfect Halloween reading on a moonlit night.

I have just started "The Amber Witch" (plenty of gothic witch-burning and occult horror for you) and it looks like this one will be just as good.

This Dover edition comes with an informative introduction by an expert on supernatural literature, Everett Bleiler, and has some illustrations (those wonderful old-style Victorian illustrations with a caption at the bottom culled from the text on the facing page)and has a very attractive cover--a picture of a ghostly castle or turret with bats flying around it.

If you like the ghost stories of M.R. James, Edgar Allan Poe or J.S. Le Fanu you will more than likely enjoy these tales immensely. They are all relatively short novellas, averaging 80-90 pages in length each.