Strange Signposts, An Anthology of the Fantastic. Ed. Roger Elwood and Sam Moskowitz (Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 319 pp., $5.50)

Strange Signposts is a bottom-of-the barrel anthology. There are Big Names in it, but don't be tempted: most of them are represented by bad stories, or excerpts from novels, or unfinished works. Mary Shelley's “story,” for instance, is an extremely disjointed 21-page condensation of an entire novel, freed from any “extraneous dialogue, description or other unnecessary exposition.” They're lucky she's dead. H. G. Wells is represented by a very early story – unfinished – and Edgar Rice Burroughs by a very late one – unfinished. There is an unusually silly excerpt from a novel by Jules Verne (which you can probably find in its entirety if you want to), and an excerpt from a boy's book that describes a helicopter (and then goes on much too long), and early pieces by Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch that I sincerely hope are their worst. Two other Big Names are included: Lovecraft (“The Whisperer in Darkness”) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Rappacini's Daughter”). The former is available in a paperback collection of Lovecraft's from Arkham House and the latter – how could they have the face to include it? – is available just about everywhere; there is no excuse for including it in anything again except a textbook. There are three naive stories from writers of the ’30s, one so-so nineteenth-century piece by Edgar Allan Poe that is two parts tedious philosophizing and politicizing and one part real fun. (This story should be in the book and this one they should have cut.) Mr. Elwood's Introduction thoughtfully synopsizes most of the stories, apparently without the slightest suspicion that he is letting out Hawthorne's whole secret and ruining Lovecraft's very slow, very effective build-up of suspense. Lucky they're both dead, too.

A collection of obscure stories by Big Names might be worth it; or one of unfindable stories or out-of-print works or previously uncollected writers (I believe someone has just issued “The King in Yellow” in paperback and a fairly expensive paperback collection of Lefanu); or even of historical curiosities like Frank Reade's helicopter (if they're tolerable) but this is none of them.