HORROR OF THE 20TH CENTURY: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY. by Weinberg, Robert - 2000

Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2000. 256 pp, folio (13/14" H). Profusely illustrated in color and b&w. "As long as there have been storytellers, audiences have sought stories that make their flesh creep and their blood curdle - stories that slither into the darkest corners of our psyches. These are the tales that have been read furtively under covers or retold in whispers by the light of campfires. From Horace Walpole to Stephen King, the masters of horror have offered us just such tales of the eerie and the spectral. Author Robert Weinberg has assembled the best of these phantasmal visions. Here is a vivid recounting of the writers, illustrators, publishers, actors, and filmmakers who for more than two centuries have fed our hunger for the macabre. As a student of the field whose collection of 25,000 genre-related materials is among the finest worldwide, Weinberg is a uniquely qualified writer whose perspectives span the spectrum of horror. (This book) begins with English author Horace Walpole who, in 1765, gave birth to the Gothic novel 'The Castle of Otranto'. Mary Shelley plundered new depths of darkness with 'Frankenstein', and late nineteenth-century readers feasted voraciously on Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw'. Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne each cast their unique spell on tales of the weird. As the modern era unfolded, horror has crept, howled, and slimed its way into the twentieth century on celluloid and paper, and Weinberg reveiws the silents and talkies, the comics, the paperbacks, and hardcovers - including such haunting and immortal creations as Frankenstein, Dracula, and 'The Phantom of the Opera'." Light wear at top/bottom of spine and at corners, minor bump at bottom of rear hinge. Dust jacket has minor wrinkling at top/bottom of spine and flap-folds, two tiny bumps on front hinge.. First American Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good+/Very Good+.