The Nightmare Reader

Peter Haining edited The Nightmare Reader, which came out in 1973. The book is an anthology of horror stories, and its organising idea is that each tale is introduced under the heading of a state of mind.

The scheme allows a wide range of material to sit together. Under a heading to do with dreams there is Washington Irving; the influence of drugs brings in Thomas De Quincey and, for morphia, Poe's Berenice; sorcery produces Lord Lytton; claustrophobia brings in a story about a man in a reservoir; and hallucination is represented by a tale of an ensouled violin. Later entries take in Ambrose Bierce on morbidity, Arthur Machen on a legendary dream, a story of psychic experience by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Aleister Crowley's The Testament of Magdalen Blair under the heading of the occultist.

Haining was a prolific anthologist of horror and fantasy, and the book is one of a number he put together in the 1970s, mixing better known names with pieces that had gone out of circulation.