Editor Waugh contributes a serviceable short introduction, which includes a four-type classification of the tales based on how they achieve their horrific effect: to the familiar three-part schema of "material stories," descriptive fiction where the horror arises from natural causes, "weird stories" in which the cause is depicted as supernatural, and science fiction in which the cause of horror is part of the natural universe but not one that current real-life science actually knows about, he adds a fourth category, "Janus stories" (named for the Roman god with two faces, looking in opposite directions), meaning stories where the reader's question of whether the events are natural or supernatural is deliberately left unanswered, or given an ambiguous answer.
Arrangement is chronological by publication date (the last one appearing for the first time in this volume).
Veteran anthology editors Waugh and Greenberg, here with the collaboration of the less well-known Azarian, have assembled 17 of these stories, written from the 19th century on. It's not surprising that they've often inspired stories of dark, horrific or macabre events, which may or may not end happily. But the older, humanly-operated lighthouses held an innate interest as outposts of human presence in lonely and dangerous places, beacons of light surrounded by fog and darkness, conjuring both a positive symbolism and an awareness of the very real danger that requires a lighthouse in the first place. Lighthouses are now, at least in the "developed" countries, completely automated and impersonal, and don't have the same mystique that they once did. The Lighthouse by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Blochīy the Hair of the Head by Joe R. The Woman at Seven Brothers by Wilbur Daniel Steele Messengers at the Window by Henry van Dyke
Ghost Island Light by John Fleming Wilson The Lighthouse Keeper's Secret by Anonymous The Disturber of Traffic by Rudyard Kipling Once you've read these pages, you'll never look at a lighthouse in quite the same way again.
This is a book to save for a fogbound or rain-dark night. Lighthouse Horrors collects 17 of the best from such writers as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Bloch, Jack Vance, and Ray Bradbury. Storm-swept, remote light stations and the isolated souls who man the beacons are the perfect inspirations for tales of suspense and horror.
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