Weird Tales #353 presents a selection of fine stories by modern writers, including Paul Tremplay and Robert Davies, plus features by Kenneth Hite (Lost in Lovecraft), Jason Heller (The Greatest Poison), Amanda Gannon (The Bazaar), and more! Plus an interview with horror legends Thomas Ligotti and artist Richard Corbin.

The landmark first collection by one of the masters of 20th-century American horror fiction, back in print at last Though he published over 350 short stories and more than thirty novels, most of Robert Bloch's work has long been out of print, and many readers today know him only as the author of Psycho. This new edition of his classic first collection, The Opener of the Way (1945), is the first in a series of Bloch reprints from Valancourt which aims to restore Bloch to his rightful place as one of the key 20th-century American writers of horror fiction. This volume features twenty-one early Bloch stories, most of them originally published in the famous magazine Weird Tales. Included here are such classics as the oft-imitated "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," the chilling title story "The Opener of the Way," in which an expedition to an Egyptian tomb goes horribly awry, and "The Shambler from the Stars," a Lovecraftian tale in which Lovecraft himself appears as a character. This edition also features a new introduction by one of today's greatest horror writers, Ramsey Campbell. "Robert Bloch is one of the all-time masters."-Peter Straub "A seminal influence on just about everybody. Any time devoted to studying this master is time well spent."-Fangoria

This atmospheric noir novel retraces the steps that led to a murder off the coast of Brittany, probing the relationship between law and justice. In a depressed town on France's northern coast, a man named Martial Kermeur has been arrested for the murder of real estate developer Antoine Lazenec after throwing him overboard. Called before a judge, Kermeur goes back to the beginning to explain what brought him to this desperate point: his divorce, his son's acting out, layoffs at his job, and, above all, Lazenec's dazzling project for a seaside resort. The temptation to invest all of your severance pay in a beautiful apartment with a view of the sea is great. But still, it has to be built. In this subtle, enthralling novel, Tanguy Viel examines not only the psychology of a crime, but also the larger social ills that may offer its justification.

The special Ramsey Campbell issue of Weird Tales presents 4 short stories by this modern master, plus stories by Stephen King, Robert Bloch, and many more.

A book about how Shakespeare became fascinated with the world, and how the world became fascinated with Shakespeare Ranging ambitiously across four continents and four hundred years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global. Seizing inspiration from the playwright’s own fascination with travel, foreignness, and distant worlds—worlds Shakespeare never himself explored—Andrew Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey: from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through the Baltic states in the early sixteen hundreds to the skyscrapers of twenty-first-century Beijing and Shanghai, where “Shashibiya” survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution to become a revered Chinese author. En route, Dickson traces Nazi Germany’s strange love affair with, and attempted nationalization of, the Bard, and delves deep into the history of Bollywood, where Shakespearean stories helped give birth to Indian cinema. In Johannesburg, we discover how Shakespeare was enlisted in the fight to end apartheid. In nineteenth-century California, we encounter shoestring performances of Richard III and Othello in the dusty mining camps and saloon bars of the Gold Rush. No other writer’s work has been performed, translated, adapted, and altered in such a remarkable variety of cultures and languages. Both a cultural history and a literary travelogue, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is—and why.

Enjoy this great comic from DC’s digital archive!

A record of literary properties sold at auction in the United States.