Some books should never be opened. Each step leads further down a dark road, past the skull-shaped sign pointing the way to Club Satan: The Tavern Grotesque; past the strangely menacing aquarium, which looms like an open grave; making its way to the statue-lined garden where a black-clad woman waits, her face — and her secret — obscured by a veil.

This collection, edited and introduced by the late John Pelan, contains sixty stories.

It opens with “The Unpleasantness at Carver House.” The tale begins in the aftermath of an accident, as the narrator carries his injured sister home. A sheriff stops by, asking nosy questions, but he isn’t the only unexpected guest.

“The Elcar Special” follows a man who helps maintain classic cars and learns the strange ways in which the future can reach back into the past. In “Mive,” a solitary walker finds himself drawn to the edge of a swamp, where he comes across a huge, ebony butterfly, and where he confronts the hazy line between reality and delirium.

In “The Monument,” a sculptor is tasked with attending a funeral, observing the dead woman as she lay in her coffin, and creating a life-sized monument, to be placed at the head of her grave. He decides to complete the final touches at the gravesite itself, but what he carves turns out to be not what he’d intended.

“The art of killing a person has certainly developed,” observes the narrator of “A Pair of Swords.” He, along with others, is touring a gallery lavished with ancient treasures. The guide is droning learnedly on when the narrator feels a tap on his shoulder. A stranger asks if he would step into another room and help settle a matter of honor.

Time and again, Jacobi’s protagonists find themselves swept out of their depth and into deep waters. Dread descends, the dread you might feel standing at the edge of a cliff as the ground begins to crumble away beneath you. It is as if the familiar floor of your living room had suddenly given way, revealing a dark and intricate landscape you had never imagined lay beneath your feet.

This collection includes Pelan's introduction, D. H. Olson’s obituary, and a bonus essay by Robert Bloch.