Don't Dream

"The author's dark fantasies and horror tales, 26 in all and inspired by Poe, Baudelaire and Lovecraft, appear in this volume, which also includes 12 lush prose poems from Wandrei's youth and his evocative critical essay, 'The Imaginative Element in Modern Literature.' ...his nightmare landscapes, however, notably the time-regression story 'The Lives of Alfred Kramer' and the shuddery 'Strange Harvest, ' Wandrei's 'wizard imagery'--his own term--counterpoints his richly chosen language to call up sleep-haunting specters, malignantly glowing jewels and the ashen undead....When his work was at its fearsome peak, Wandrei was very, very scary indeed."

In 1939, Wandrei cofounded Arkham House to publish the work of H.P. Lovecraft. But he also was a writer of sf, horror, and fantasy for the pulp magazines Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. In a companion volume to Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (Fedogan & Bremer, 1989), editors Philip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler have rescued from obscurity Wandrei's published and unpublished horror and fantasy short fiction, prose poems, essays, and marginalia. Don't Dream contains traditional supernatural horror stories, lighthearted fantasy tales, non-science oriented science fiction, and his short "dream" mood pieces. While some of his pseudo-science is now dated, Wandrei's imaginative use of language renders his fiction worthy of new reading 60 years after it was first published. Highly recommended...