THE COMPLETE MASTERS OF DARKNESS

A novelty horror omnibus containing the mass-market reprint anthologies of Masters of Darkness (1986) and Masters of Darkness II (1988), plus a new collection of old material, Masters of Darkness III. The hook here is that Etchison has invited the authors, 15 to each volume, to select ""personal favorites""--so what's between the covers is rarely the writer's best, or best-known, work but more often a story (or poem or teleplay) that the author simply wants to see back in print (Ray Bradbury, for example, admits that he selected ""The Dead Man"" because ""it has rarely been reprinted""--for good reason). Moreover, some of the authors are decidedly odd for a horror book, with many of them primarily science-fiction writers (Damon Knight, Gardner Dozois, Jack Vance, William F. Nolan, Barry N. Malzberg, etc.). Still, there is some rare if not top-flight fiction by King, Strieber, Richard Christian Matheson, Dean Koontz, and David Morrell, among others, and the collection--at 750 pages--necessarily has at least a few stories that will please all fans, although only horror completists will cherish the entire volume.