Sardonicus and Other Stories (1961), cover by Richard Powers Penguin Classics released it in a new hardcover edition in 2013 with a new foreword by Guillermo del Toro, and the book will be released in paperback for the first time at the end of this month, with a deliciously creepy new cover (above right). Stephen King called his novelette “Sardonicus,” his best known work, “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written.” It was collected, with the follow up tales “Sanguinarius” and “Sagittarius,” in Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories, published in hardcover in 1985 by Maclay & Associates, with a cover by Stanley Mossman (above left).

His novels included The Case Against Satan (1962), Incubus (1976), and Absolute Power (1992), and he published a half dozen horror collections in his lifetime, including Unholy Trinity (1967), Prince of Darkness (1971), and The Book of Hell (1980). Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Ray Russell received the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 and the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Engrossing, grotesque, and completely entrancing, Russell's Gothic tales are the best kind of dreadful.

Horror legend Ray Russell's haunting and macabre stories, including 'perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written' (Stephen King), with a foreword by acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro Haunted Castles is the definitive, complete collection of Ray Russell's masterful Gothic horror stories, including the famously terrifying novella trio of 'Sardonicus,' 'Sanguinarius,' and 'Sagittarius.' The characters that sprawl through Haunted Castles are frightful to the core: the heartless monster holding two lovers in limbo the beautiful dame journeying down a damned road toward depravity (with the help of an evil gypsy) the man who must wear his fatal crimes on his face in the form of an awful smile.

Haunted Castles by Ray Russell