A monstrously frightening collection of pulp-style short stories, this is another in the British Library Science Fiction Classics series. It’s my least favourite so far, but it does have a brilliant introduction by Mike Ashley which considers our ideas of what monsters are and the history of monsters in fiction. There were only two stories I thought were excellent and that also appealed to me, those by John Christopher and Idris Seabright. I was disappointed that the cover illustration, which shows a giant lobster terrorising people, was not from a story in the collection.

‘The War of the Worlds’ by H G Wells – not the full-length novel, but a very abridged version with all-action, no suspense.

‘The Cloud-Men’ by Owen Oliver – sentient cloud-like aliens invade in this story which is similar to Wells but not as good.

‘The Dragon of St. Paul’s’ by Reginald Bacchus and C Ranger Gull – an ancient creature is defrosted and causes havoc in London, seen from a journalistic perspective.

‘De Profundis’ by Coutts Brisbane – ants rise up and eat anyone who isn’t armed with petrol, which would not be out of place in the Crawling Horror anthology from the Tales of the Weird series.

‘Dagon’ by H P Lovecraft – early story not quite into his best era, a horrifying tale of a shipwreck survivor who sees something dreadful on an island.

‘In Amundsen’s Tent’ by John Martin Leahy – indescribable weird presence in the Antarctic which eats explorers.

‘King Kong’ by Draycott Dell and Edgar Wallace – story based on the novelisation of the famous movie.

‘The Monster from Nowhere’ by Nelson S Bond – a dangerous creature from another dimension is captured.

‘Discord in Scarlet’ by A E van Vogt – the author claimed that this story inspired the film Alien and indeed there are similarities, although the alien from the film is even deadlier despite not being able to arrange its atoms to move through things.

‘Monster’ by John Christopher – this is a unique perspective on the Loch Ness monster legend, which is a great twist halfway though.

‘Resident Physician’ by James White – a doctor has a medical puzzle to solve when an unidentified creature, which is also a criminal, is brought in.

‘Personal Monster’ by Idris Seabright – an unsettling tale of little girl who discovers a giant alien head in the ash pit, and finds a neat solution to its feeding while she is away.

‘Alien Invasion’ by Marcia Kamien – a woman gives birth to an alien whose species has chosen her to help them, however I didn’t think this story realised its full potential.

‘The Witness’ by Eric Frank Russell – an alien refugee is tried in the US court with billions watching, a clever story though not easy to read.

Published in 2019. The stories range from 1899 to 1961.

Check out my reviews of other books in the British Library SF Classics series: Menace of the Machine, Future Crimes, Spaceworlds, Beyond Time.