Covering the third of Boris Karloff’s three anthologies of dark tales.
The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology, first published in 1965, is rather different from Karloff’s previous two anthologies. Tales of Terror and And the Darkness Falls were both collaborations with Karloff’s friend, the editor Edmund Speare. Both those anthologies highlighted stories that, while macabre, could mostly be considered “mainstream” or “literary” tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology, on the other hand, has more of a pulp magazine feel, and features almost all stories from the mid-twentieth century (nothing earlier than 1936; Table of Contents here). The one exception is Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” which is included because John Jake’s story “The Opener of the Crypt” is a sequel to Poe’s classic tale.

This difference raises a number of possibilities about the editorship of the anthologies:
- Speare had more to do with the editing of the first two anthologies than one might think.
- Karloff had less to do with the editing of the third anthology than one might think.
- Karloff’s tastes, and his thoughts on the definition of terror, had evolved in the intervening two decades.
- Some combination of the above.