Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

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To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature. If you believe in the ability and willingness of surgeons to transplant brains from skull to skull with shocking results, these stories may frighten you, but merely in the same way — though hardly to the same extent — that having to take ether in a strange hospital would frighten you. If you believe in ghosts, you can hope to derive from these stories at the very most a weak semblance of the sensation you would experience on being told there was a bogey-man in the closet, or on having the village cut-up wrapped in a sheet jump out of hiding at you. If you believe in werewolves, then it can make little difference to you, except perhaps academically, whether your heroine is eaten by one of them or shot down by a Cicero muscle-man. To the truly superstitious the “weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “Something which actually takes place.”

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