This is Horror Tales: Spirits, Spells, & the Unknown (1974), edited by Roger Elwood and gorgeously illustrated by Robert Baumgartner. It is, I thiiink, the last in an unofficial 6-volume series of similarly bound and dressed books from Rand McNally (the others are Tales of Terror, Monster Tales, Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures, and two volumes of Science Fiction Tales. Most of them are edited by Elwood. I know them from when I was a kid — my local library had a few of them on the shelves. They don’t seem common on the second-hand market, which makes me think they were primarily marketed to libraries, similar to Helen Hoke’s excellent anthologies.

I confess, I have never read this. Honestly, I don’t recognize a single author. Well, one, maybe, I think might be a shitheel who got booted from the Horror Writers Association a couple years back. The rest ring no bells — if you told me they were all Elwood writing under different pseudonyms, I’d believe you.

I’m hear for the art, really. Baumgatner’s stuff is somehow both wholesome and nightmarish. There is a folksy vibe to his style and it mostly feels warm and inviting, but everything also looks like it might melt into horrible goo at any moment, the way the G.I. Joes do in the mindfucking horror cartoon classic, “There’s No Place Like Springfield.” I particularly like the one of the kid in bed, scared of the shadows and the tree outside, because it reminds me of staring at my wallpaper as a kid in bed and being convinced it was moving and that the toys in the pattern were going to come down off the wall and get me. God. Where was I? Halloween? Horror? Never turn the lights off ever again?