Friday's "Forgotten" Book: Robert Arthur, editor: ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME (Random House, 1963)

• Published in 1963 in the USA by Random House (hardback)
• Edited by Robert Arthur
• 401 pages

Contents

1. Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock (ghost written)
2. The Child Who Believed by Grace Amundson
3. Just a Dreamer by Robert Arthur
4. The Wall-to-Wall Grave by Andrew Benedict
5. The Wind by Ray Bradbury
6. Congo by Stuart Cloete
7. Witch's Money by John Collier
8. Dip in the Pool by Roald Dahl
9. The Secret of the Bottle novelette by Gerald Kersh
10. I Do Not Hear You, Sir by Avram Davidson
11. The Arbutus Collar by Jeremiah Digges
12. A Short Trip Home novelette by F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. An Invitation to the Hunt by George Hitchcock
14. The Man Who Was Everywhere by Edward D. Hoch
15. The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
16. Adjustments by George Mandel
17. The Children of Noah by Richard Matheson
18. The Idol of the Flies by Jane Rice
19. Courtesy of the Road by Mack Morriss
20. Remains to Be Seen by Jack Ritchie (as Steve O'Connell)
21. The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles by Margaret St. Clair (as Idris Seabright)

    One of Dell's half-the-hc-content reprints

22. Lost Dog by Henry Slesar
23. Hostage by Don Stanford
24. Natural Selection by Gilbert Thomas
25. Simone by Joan Vatsek
26. Smart Sucker by Richard Wormser
27. Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon

UK edition

It's a very close call (due to their consistent excellence), but this might be my favorite of the AHP: volumes that Robert Arthur edited (Harold Q. Masur took up the task after Arthur's death in 1969, till Hitchcock's death in 1980).  Quite a large number of these stories have stuck with me over the years since I first read them, at age nine, in one of the first of the adult "Hitchcock" anthologies I took up, and it is a pretty striking slice through a range of many of the best writers of the time (we'd lost Fitzgerald, but not too many of the others yet) who'd done some sort of work in suspense fiction and related fields...the Jackson, the St. Clair, the Bradbury and the Davidson are (unsurprisingly) memorable horror stories (St. Clair's is her most famous story by some distance, and almost deservedly so);  the Matheson is Just this side of Reality, and not less unsettling (at least to the young reader) for it, even as one key aspect of Theodore Sturgeon's novel about a non-supernatural vampire did inspire some investigation on my part as to what the novel's resolution involved (hint: it isn't altogether unrelated to the previous post on this blog). Even if I mostly remember "The Arbutus Collar" for how puzzled I was as to how pronounce "arbutus"(I recall that the dictionary was not helpful), the balance of the volume, from writers as splashy as Kersh and Collier and Rice and Dahl (to say nothing of the South African Cloete--I wouldn't learn how to pronounce "Clew-tee" for years)  or as simply as assiduous as Hoch and Ritchie (though I didn't know it was Ritchie story till today) or as interesting  though overlooked as Thomas, collectively sticks with me as simply so much enjoyment and revelation, about the nature and range of storytelling one could find in these eclectic volumes.  It's too easy for me to cite a given volume of the various Arthur/AH series for FFB purposes, perhaps, but these books really should be remembered clearly, as an achievement on their own ticket, and as an example of how the task can be done...

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for today's prompter citations.