The inn sign … was in the nature of a coffin supported by six headless bearers goose-stepping towards a white headstone, and underneath this somewhat forbidding daub with grim irony, the legend ‘Ye Journey’s End’ - Guy Preston, The Inn .

Gruesome Cargoes is a celebration of Christine Campbell Thomson’s Not At Night Anthologies (1925 – 1936). 170 tales of mad scientists, evil surgeons, unlikey brain transplants, tropical horrors, circus freaks, vampires, werewolves, man-eating plants, enormous spiders, the re-animated dead & Co!

From the first, I set myself against “literature”; the story was the thing, and no amount of style could persuade me to select a story that lacked genuine, unadulterated horror. For those who wanted something high-brow there was plenty. – Christine Campbell Thomson

Gruesome Cargoes is also a celebration of Charles Lloyd Birkin’s Creeps series (1932 -1936): 158 stories, similar obsessions to the above but with added unhealthy cannibalism and leprosy fixations.

The Gruesome Cargoes forum is a place to discuss these books and further works by Charles Birkin, John Gawsworth’s Thrills and other between the wars horror and ghost anthologies. And it really needs your help!