Where Terror Stalked and Other Horror Stories by Charles Birkin

At this point, it’s hard to find most Birkin books for sale on Amazon or eBay. I sought everything I could find, spending around $20 for each banged up, moldy paperback. I am crazy about short stories, especially clever horror, and at the time (circa-2015), Birkin’s style worked for me. (That story, “Some New Pleasures Prove” is in The Kiss of Death see that review, note. It was weird and gross and combined upper-class, stodgy Britishness with shocking viciousness and a smart female lead. Birkin’s story was unlike anything I’d read of 1960’s horror. I found one of his stories randomly when taking out an old horror anthology at the library seven or eight years ago (1972’s A Tide of Terror: An Anthology of Rare Horror Stories, edited by Hugh Lamb). He passed away in 1985 and, as far as I know, no posthumous writings were found or published. Oddly, he didn’t publish another collection until 1964 with The Kiss of Death, and then released seven more books by 1970, at which point he stopped again. Those stories were collected in his first volume, Devil’s Spawn (1936). When he was younger, he helped edit horror anthologies and put some of his own work in them. But in this case, we need to do a tiny bit of table setting:īirkin was born in 1907 in England, likely pretty wealthy from birth (Educated at Eton sister had an affair with Edward VIII was 5 th Baronet, which sounds impressive). (Don’t worry, you’re fine.) I don’t usually go into author bios on this page I try to take writing on its own terms for the most part. You probably don’t know who Charles Birkin is. For this October, I thought: “Perfect! He’s an interesting, forgotten author of great, grotesque stories. I got it into my head several years ago that it would be a great idea to do a month where I cover a bunch of Charles Birkin. So this is the month where I may lose any of you who are following.

Where Terror Stalked and Other Horror Stories by Charles Birkin