August Derleth’s anthology Sleep No More (1944) has a really apt subtitle: Twenty Masterpieces of Horror for the Connoisseur. As an anthology, it is indeed an early and important classic that draws mostly on tales originally published in Weird Tales by authors who would form the stable for Derleth’s Arkham House press in coming years. Of the 20 authors included, 12 would get their own dedicated Arkham collections (14, if you count Hazel Heald and W. B. Talman as Lovecraft, 15 if you know S. Grendon is a pseudonym for August Derleth himself). Non-Arkham writers tend to be Brits. The anthology leads with my favorite M. R. James story, “Count Magnus.” Thomas Burke, John Collier, Robert W. Chambers and Alfred Noyes round out the UK contingent. Frenchman Maurice Level is the lone non-English writer. Just about every story here is a heavy hitter and the book did well enough that sequels appeared the next two years — Who Knocks? and The Night Side.

Perhaps the most important thing in Sleep No More is the illustrations. They’re by Lee Brown Coye and, to my knowledge, the book marks his first publication as an illustrator. Look at that cover! Coye’s style is strange, often verging on abstract. Figures of elongated proportions lean out of deep shadows or stand entirely in silhouette. He is comfortable depicting the disgusting, like that rat gnawing the corpse skull, eegads! Of his trademark sticks, though, there is no trace, alas!