Sometimes you see these stories as Hammer movies. Gentleman scholars of independent means collect macabre esoterica. They visit the British Museum to investigate forbidden grimoires of occult lore with strange unpronounceable Lovecraftian names. Other people inherit substantial fortunes, or isolated mansions with bizarre conditions attached to their acceptance. They decipher coded diaries by the light of desk lamps, and read lost manuscript fragments that recount hideous dreams. While madmen in padded cells tell tales no-one believes of the literally mind-bending horrors that resulted in their asylum incarceration. And all the while unnameable things rot in vaults of crawling darkness.

It’s all oddly comfortable traditional horror scenarios, using ‘framing’ devices familiar from Dennis Wheatley, Poe, or Hammer. Even when things degenerate into slasher cannibalism in a Movie House (in ‘Back Row’) it’s no multiplex but the kind of decaying fleapit redolent of early 70s sleaze. And even that occurs in a story published as recently as 1988. Brian Lumley is no stylist. No innovator. His prose and dialogue are more usually functional than inspirational. While his attempts at dialect - cartoon Hell’s Angels (in ‘The Luststone’) and caricature Scotsmen even Russ Abbott would flinch (‘What Dark God’) can be embarrassing.

Yet the critique he claims for his fiction is "not its contents, but the feeling it evokes." And he is a story-teller of ridiculous readability within the genre he defines as "entertainment by frisson." Following Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi and Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords, this book forms the third instalment of a trilogy of collections, each with a witch’s dozen of stories, mapping Lumley’s 25 year evolution as a writer from December 1967 (‘Rising with Surtsey’), through the period of his reputation-making Necroscope and Vampire World series to about, now. This volume collects and sometimes modifies from such places as Ramsey Campbell’s New Tales of The Cthulhu Mythos, Magazine of Fantasy & SF, Weird Tales and beyond into places where "mist casts languorous tentacles."

He’s aware, perhaps too aware of his antecedents, but although his two Titus Crow stories and the mythos contender ‘The House of The Temple’ are strong traditional tales, the most fully realised things here are those that break from his Lovecraftian preoccupations to stake out more contemporary terrain.

‘The Sun, The Sea, and The Silent Scream’ set on a well-drawn Greek island, uses vivid parasitic crustacea to evoke a genuinely atmospheric tension that achieves its power largely through understatement. ‘The Thief Immortal’ takes the audacious idea of a kind of life-force vampirism that operates on a law of diminishing returns, so that to prolong his life further he needs more and more victims to refuel his life for shorter and shorter periods. A beautifully worked out conundrum, extending into the future by digesting entire species and whole island populations. ‘Snarker’s Son’ is a neat foray into alternative worlds, following a similar venture in Dagon’s Bell, while ‘David’s Worm’, about a mutated micro-organism with attitude, is hugely enjoyable hokum (written in 1969) in which Lumley risks collapsing the whole fantasy way beyond all limits of credibility, yet hauls the reader through with sheer verve, nerve and humour to a punchline well worth waiting for.

Sometimes you might see these stories as Hammer Movies. But the best are not Hammer Horror at all. In fact they go way out past the Outer Limits of the X-Files, and are all the better because of it.