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Mafia Versus Witchcraft! "With such consummate skill," wrote the New York Times, "has Mr. Merritt told his story in Burn Witch Burn that one is almost ready to believe that such things can be, even in this twentieth century of ours." Not available in paperback, here is the fabled novel of an eminent physician who agrees to work along side one of the city's most notorious gangsters to put an end to a strange and mysterious series of deaths that have claimed a child, a millionaire, one of the don's men and the doctor's nurse. Investigation leads the pair to the uncanny Madame Mandilip, proprietress of a most unusual doll shop, and her apparently mute and terrified daughter. Soon the Mafia don lies on the verge of death and the doctor finds himself the victim of strange hallucinations--or are they? From page to page the nightmare figure of Madame Mandilip grows more horrible and deadly until she spreads like a menacing shadow across the lives of the doctor and his friends.

Long out of print, this novel, which inspired the legendary 1930s horror film, Devil Doll with Lionel Barymore, is considered one of the supreme masterpieces of dark fantasy. "There is no individual writing today," wrote Donald A. Wollheim, author of Mimic, "that can torture his reader by way of the suspense element as much as Merritt and know at which point to stop; to save him perhaps for future tortures." Or, as the New York Times said, "You'll find here a collection of horrors that really horrify, most skillfully blended into a tale of mounting hellishness, the whole flavored with that peculiar quality that Merritt readers know about."

This Two Thousand Year-Old Sorceress Had the Power to Turn People into Shadows!

Here is A. Merritt's masterwork, our publisher's pick for the best of all his classic fantasies. Creep, Shadow! Is based on legends of Ys and an old Breton song:

Fisher, fisher, have you seen
White Dahut, the Shadow Queen
Riding on her stallion black
At her heels her shadow pack?

Had the last King and Princess of wicked Ys, returned after three thousand years? Why were they creating an exact replica of Stonehenge on their New Jersey estate? What was the Mael Bennique, the Breaker of Chests? And what was the dread Gatherer in the Cairn? And can men and women really be turned into shadows and made the helpless slaves of the one who transformed them?

Ethnologist Alan Caranac (who may just be the reincarnation of the Alain de Carnac who brought about the destruction of sinful Ys and its evil rulers) has to find out the answer, for one of his best friends has been killed, and perhaps transformed into a shadow, while his fiancee Helen, her brother, Bill, and the famed Dr. Lowell have already been marked for death or worse!

But first Alan will have to enter the tower of the Demoiselle Dahut de Ys in New York and journey through it thousands of years into the past to her tower in the legendary city from which she draws her name. And then return, if he can!

In this stunning sequel to his classics Burn, Witch, Burn!, the great A. Merritt, an authority on ancient magic and civilizations, captured the feeling of sorcery and the supernatural as never before! Discover why the New York Times raved that Merritt's writings spin "a shimmering, glittering web of imagination" whose "fertility never seems to lessen"; andwhy Analog magazine called his stories "crammed with fascinating people and creatures." Here is a classic by the author the Science Fiction Encyclopedia crowned "the supreme fantasy genius."