the frequently anthologized Seed from the Sepulcher was wonderfully grim and disgusting and did body horror decades before anyone else. this is CAS at his most polished, although "polished" does little to describe his marvelous combination of disdainful irony and bleak humor, hysteria and grotesquerie, bizarre flights of fancy, dense walls of prose delivered in an extravagantly purple style, and of course the fulsome harvest of obscure words in each and every story. same goes, mainly, for the love stories he's just not that into them at this point. the occasional amateurishness that marred some prior stories is nowhere to be found in this book. two more collections to go, so hopefully this peak will be a plateau. here are the mid-career stories in which the weird master's idiosyncratic style has reached its peak. I liked this one rather more than the preceding collection and rather less than the first volume.
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