The Weird Cat ed by S. T. Joshi & Katherine Kerestman
Trade Paperback.
A well-told horror story has much in common with your own cherished puss. Kitty jumps upon your lap and purrs, and you turn the page of your book.
Pray, take heed! Some dire thing is afoot! On your lap, Kitty stirs, her ears lifting into two small velvet tents. She raises her chin, stares expectantly into the gloom beyond the aura of the reading lamp, gazes at something which you cannot see! Her silken hairs begin to fluff, signaling her unease. Swiftly, Kitty moves from your lap onto the arm of your chair, where, channeling Bastet, she strikes an Egyptian-cat pose, her expectant stance and twitching whiskers communicating unseen peril.
The hairs on your neck begin to rise in sympathy. As you doggedly continue reading your book, you cast frequent glances at your cat: Kitty provides you with a sixth sense which you lack, a window into the unseen and the uncanny. You are mindful that cats dwell in a larger world than our own, the gulfs and abysses of which we can obtain but a shadowy glimpse, through their eyes.
In The Weird Cat you delve into that larger realm through more than three dozen classic and contemporary short stories, poems, and essays by masters of the craft including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H.P. Lovecraft, Mary A. Turzillo, Christina Sng, Darrell Schweitzer, and others. Edited by Katherine Kerestman and S. T. Joshi.
Contents:
Introduction | Katherine Kerestman and S. T. Joshi |
The Tyger | William Blake |
The Cat That Walked by Himself | Rudyard Kipling |
The Headless Cat of No. — Lower Seedley Road, Seedley, Manchester | Elliott O’Donnell |
*Ghost Bats | Jason C. Eckhardt |
The Cat | M. P. Shiel |
The Cat-hood of Maurice | E. Nesbit |
The Cats | H. P. Lovecraft |
The Brazilian Cat | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
*Talmir and Threstenios | Manuel Perez-Campos |
*Le Chat Noir, La Femme Vieille | Alan Dean Foster |
The Cat with Wings | Robert W. Service |
Cat and Mouse | Ramsey Campbell |
The Black Cat | Rainer Maria Rilke |
A Cargo of Cat | Ambrose Bierce |
*The Witch of the Dark Woods | Katherine Kerestman |
Gray | M. F. Webb |
The Cats of River Street | Caitlin R. Kiernan |
Old Man | H. P. Lovecraft |
*Nimbus | Stephen Mark Rainey |
*The Only Thing a Cat Can Do | Christina Sng |
The Boy Who Drew Cats | Lafcadio Hearn |
The Crimson Curse | Tony LaMalfa |
The Sphinx at Gizeh | Lord Dunsany |
The King of the Cats | Adam Bolivar |
In the Valley of the Sorceress | Sax Rohmer |
La Gata | Lori R. Lopez |
Marked | Anna Taborska |
The Cat and the Moon | W. B. Yeats |
The Adventure of the Hanoverian Vampires | Darrell Schweitzer |
*Bad Cats | Michael Potts |
The Cheshire Cat | Lewis Carroll |
*Nine | Hank Schwaeble |
Familiar | Frank Coffman |
The Attic | Algernon Blackwood |
*Cats and the Occult: A Canthropology | Katherine Kerestman |
*Ailurophobe | Mary Turzillo |