INCOMING

• Groff Conklin, editor, Operation Future.  SF anthology with nineteen stories.  There once was a time when, on mentioning SF anthologies, the mind went automatically to Groff Conklin.
• David Ely, Time Out.  Mystery/horror/unclassifiable collection of fifteen stories.  Ely may be best known for his novel Seconds, which became a Rock Hudson cult movie.  Ely's Edgar-winning short story "The Sailing Club" is included here, as is his chilling "The Academy."  If  the other thirteen stories here are half as good, this book will represent money well spent.
• Laurence L. Janifer, Impossible?  SF collection of sixteen stories, one in collaboration with Donald Westlake and one with Michael Kurland; some of the storieswere first printed under the "Larry M. Harris" by-line.  (I hinted in an earlier blog post that I am a great fan of the late Craig Rice.  As Harris, Janifer wrote The Pickled Poodles, a mystery featuring Rice's character John J. Malone -- a Forgotten Book choice someday, perhaps, unless someone beats me to it.  Janifer and Randall Garret also wrote a classic SF trilogy under the joint pseudonym "Mark Phillips" about one of Malone's descendants [Brain Twister, The Impossibles, and Supermind])
• Edna Mitchell Preston, editor, The Arrow Book of Spooky Stories.  Fifty-year-old children's anthology of ghost and folk tales.  Ten stories and one poem.