Blackwood's "The Glamour of the Snow" is a masterpiece of the weird, about a man, vacationing in the Alps, who's drawn to an ethereal ice-skater who only skates late at night, and who may lead him to his doom. The other highlight is one I'd read before, but it was no less powerful this time around. This was a very eerie story that reminded me a bit of both George RR Martin's and Lisa Tuttle's early sf/horror hybrids, but steeped in Machen's strange tales of pagan lore. She raises the child on the planet, though she has an odd feeling they're not alone. She knows she didn't sleep with anyone, but she did have a very strange dream about someone, or some- thing coming to her one night while she was alone. She had somehow gotten pregnant during their stay, and she's worried the baby won't survive the intense pressure of hyperdrive. The first, "The Wind People" by new-to-me author Marion Zimmer Bradley, is an atmospheric slow-burner that takes place in the far future on an uninhabited, forested distant planet, where a ship from Earth crash-lands, and one woman decides to stay behind once the crew eventually gets the ship patched up. There were two stories here that made this anthology worth reading, however. Bloch's dream-like "The Thinking Cap," about a writer who's new-found cure for writer's-block has a rather unfortunate price, was clever, but ultimately forgettable. Machen's early, hugely influential weird novella "The Great God Pan" definitely belongs in a book entitled Demon Lovers and Strange Seductions, but here we're only given an 18-page excerpt. "A Touch of Strange" by the usually reliable Sturgeon was another I'd read before, a tale of love between a human and a mermaid, and it's definitely strange, and somewhat touching, but was one of the lesser stories from the same-titled collection of his where I'd first read it. Fredric Brown has a short, 1-page experimental story called "Too Far" that's nothing but a series of puns that, yes, goes a bit "too far." Enjoyable, but nothing special. I do enjoy Le Fanu's ghost stories when I'm in the mood, but it was a chore keeping my eyes open through this or retain anything I was reading, even though it's not a long story. Le Fanu's blend of historical fact and faerie folklore that opens the book, "Ultor de Lacy," did nothing for me when I first read it 20 years ago, and little more now.
This 1971 anthology was a bit of a mixed bag for me.
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