Description

The Library of Weird Fiction by Carl Jacobi

Hardcover – Centipede Press – December 2025 – 1008 pages

Some books should never be opened. Each step leads further down a dark road, past the skull-shaped sign pointing the way to Club Satan: The Tavern Grotesque; past the strangely menacing aquarium, which looms like an open grave; making its way to the statue-lined garden where a black-clad woman waits, her face — and her secret — obscured by a veil.

This massive collection, edited and introduced by the late John Pelan, firmly establishes Carl Jacobi as one of the great writers of weird fiction. Story after story — and there are sixty of them here — reads like a nightmare you’d had years before: a nightmare you’d forgotten having but that hasn’t forgotten about you.

Time and again, Jacobi’s protagonists find themselves swept out of their depth and into deep waters. Dread descends, the dread you might feel standing at the edge of a cliff as the ground begins to crumble away beneath you. But it’s worse: it’s as if the familiar floor of your living room had suddenly given way, revealing a dark and intricate landscape you had never imagined lay beneath your feet.

There’s a reason Stephen King called the author “one of the finest writers to come out of the Golden Age of Fantasy.” This monumental collection, bookended by Pelan’s detailed introduction. D.H. Olson’s moving obituary, and a bonus essay by Robert Bloch, is a cause for celebration. Finally, the devil’s been given his due.