Amazon Category:  Horror Publisher: Pocket Books ISBN-10:  0671885987 Type: Fiction Pages: 373 Copyright: Dec 1 1998 Buy a copy direct from me! See below... Now in its Third Printing! Tales of madness and murder from the likes of Stephen King, Jane Yolen, Charles Grant, Billie Sue Mosiman, and others. Includes Bill Gagliani's "Icewall." BUY DIRECT FROM ME: tarkusp.execpc.com. Anthology presented by the Horror Writers Association, edited by the legendary Robert Bloch (author of "Psycho"), and now serving as a memorial to this great talent who left us much too soon. Every kind of horror and noir tale is represented here, but each and every one will touch you in some way -- even if it'll feel like icicle-cold fingers in the middle of your back on a chilly night... Excerpt I looked back, toward where the hut would be, and saw for the first time that the line of posts did curve slightly to the right. There was no way I could find the hut in the storm, not without the railing to guide me. Panting from exertion, the bruises in my lungs and nostrils throbbing, I straddled the railing and fell into the doorway and down the five steps. My face mask was gone, torn off sometime during the walk. My nose and lips were numb. My cheeks were slabs of marble. Hands trembling, I flicked the switch on the lantern and watched a whole lot of nothing happen. I turned it a dozen times, the click of the switch loud even above the wind outside. I followed the cable out the door and started pulling, wrapping the thin wire around my hand and elbow. It was cold and stiff, but it came. It came all too easily. The snipped end reached my hands and I saw the metal poking through the clean cut. In a rush of anger, I threw the useless cable out the door and turned back into the dome. I lit the stove and forced myself to calm down and think -- (From "Icewall," by William D. Gagliani)

From LOCUS #444, January 1998
"William D. Gagliani's 'Icewall' gives us two winter-bound techies inhabiting a research project not terribly far from the South Pole. The atmosphere's right out of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s 'Who Goes There?', and the author acknowledges that. But the message seems clear that the real monsters are from within our own souls -- not from outer space."

-Edward Bryant






From KLIATT Reviews
"Icewall" by William D. Gagliani, with its Antarctic science station setting, has definite overtones of the psychological SF
thriller.

-Reviewed by Larry W. Prater.
KLIATT Reviews;
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved.

Ed Bryant, in LOCUS #444
"Some observers might feel that the apparently endlessly fascinating vein of lunatic killers has long since been played out. Indeed, the strain of scrambling to say something new (or graphically *show* something novel) clearly intrudes into some of the contents; but there's still sufficient material in ROBERT BLOCH'S PSYCHOS to demonstrate there's yet more than mere glavanic response left in the well-plumbed corpus. Yes, life persists doggedly... And doubtless will until citizens of the paranoid '90s no longer start awake at four in the morning, sure they heard the clinking from downstairs as an intruder selects just the appropriate instrument from the kitchen Ginsu knife rack."

"Even in a reading arena clubbed into near-insensibility by the manifold emulators of Thomas Harris, ROBERT BLOCH'S PSYCHOS contains some first-rate variations on the theme. It's a decent memorial for the deceased and much-missed author."