WHISPERS: An Anthology of Fantasy and Horror

There's not much of more than momentary interest in these 20 selections from Schiff's fantasy-and-horror mag of the same name. One finds a maddening preponderance of horrid hieroglyphics, mouldering foulness, dark relics immemorial, and other etiolated cliches of the genre at its most childish. Those who handle these materials with any style are in the minority. Robert Bloch writes himself into an amusing trifle about the malefic inner compulsions of f-and-h types; Richard Christian Matheson tosses off a very funny epistolary chronicle of simplehearted mayhem; Ramsey Campbell delicately expands a childhood neurosis into a glimpse of a larger terror. The most solid contribution is Dennis Etchison's ""White Moon Rising,"" a brilliant tableau of a college campus stalked by an unknown rapist-killer. But there are too many geese among these swans to attract a non-habitue audience.