Hell! Said the Duchess by Michael Arlen.

WO: British Thriller is right! The book does begin like a Seabury Quinn occult investigation yarn, but take on the intense atmosphere of a Lovecraftian horror in the hands of the master himself. Perhaps the best of the British thrillers.” KEW: “This begins routinely enough-an occult investigator is called in to slay an ancestral ghost in a gloomy castle-then takes off to become a 1930s version of Blish’s Black Easter. Look for the many Easter eggs tying the novel back to the father of sword-and-sorcery. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth,” featuring the offspring of that one night quid pro quo between Bran Mak Morn and the witch. WO: An excellent “modern” sequel to Robert E. Gees was a private investigator whose cases often involved the supernatural-in this case, pre-Druidic magic and an immortal sorcerer.”

KEW: “The best of Mann’s ‘Gees’ series, most of which are very good indeed. Not to mention, The Devil-Doll, staring two great actors, Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O’Sullivan, is an excellent adaptation of Merritt’s novel. A fantastic read by the man who influenced all the greats. WO: Merritt takes first place in my ranking, and deservedly so. KEW: “Best known for his lost-race fantasy novels, this time Merritt is equally brilliant at modern horror, in a tale of murderous dolls animated by the souls of their human counterparts.

I decided to read all 13 for myself, rank order them, and provide both Wagner’s short review along with my own. There is no indication that he rank ordered these stories. Karl Edward Wagner published his famous list of 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine in the May-June 1983 issue. This edition features a reproduction of the original dust jacket art.Karl Edward Wagner’s 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels Ranked Nicolson (1885-1944), Fingers of Fear (1937) was hailed by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the finest supernatural horror novels ever written, and it is perhaps unrivaled in its ability to evoke a weird and uncanny atmosphere of eerie dread. Is there a vampire, a werewolf, or something even worse, at Ormesby? Seaforth must try to piece together the secrets of the strange Ormes family, but things take a still more sinister turn when the first brutally murdered corpse is found. Ghosts stalk the corridors, and Seaforth awakens to find a mark made by a human mouth on his neck.

But almost as soon as he arrives at Ormesby, it is clear that something is terribly wrong. When an old school friend, Ormond Ormes, offers Seaforth a job cataloguing the library at the mansion of Ormesby in the Berkshires, it seems as though things may finally be turning around. Utterly ruined by the stock market crash of 1929, Selden Seaforth has lost his money, his job, and his wife.

Fingers of Fear by J.U. Nicolson