Witches & Warlocks (1989) is, well, what it says. It’s a better mix of stories, I think, but still not…I dunno. It bugs me that there is such a density of non-horror writers in here? W.B. Yeats, L. Frank Baum, Nikolai Gogol, Hawthorne, Stevenson, even Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells…the stories are fine, but it feels like their inclusion is an entreaty to literary legitimacy, I suppose. And length. It says to me, “Please take this book seriously,” in a way that makes me not want to at all. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable.

Some excellent tales here, nevertheless. Manly Wade Wellman’s “Ever the Faith Endures” is first rate and genuinely rare. “Sanguinarius,” by Ray Russell, too, and Jean Ray’s “The Mainz Psalter,” I think were hard to track down at that time. Also, the Derleth-in-a-Lovecraft-Suit story “Witches’ Hollow,” which isn’t a great story, but one I am nonetheless fond of (stay tuned for an explanation as to why in October).

This is Edward Gorey’s most whimsical of the Kaye covers, I think — a plethora of silly sorcerers on dragonback, flying to sabbath, a bunch of nudie weirdos. Again, sort of unusual for Gorey in the choice of colors, which are both bright and varied. There’s a ton of patterning too, in the scales and wings of the dragons which I love — I feel like one of the secret appeals of Gorey is his intricately detailed wallpapers, and it is neat to see that applied to a monster.

There are three more Kaye/Gorey books, incidentally, all of which come before the subject of tomorrow’s post. Haunted America (1990) is pretty good, but brutally cropped Gorey’s cover art. Two volumes of play also emerged in 1990: 13 Plays of Ghosts and the Supernatural, whose theming is self-evident, and Sweet Revenge, which are crime themed.