Horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (1919-2001) was born today, May 30. This is the second birthday post I’ve done today. The other was Hal Clement. Clement wrote hard science fiction. Chetwynd-Hayes wrote horror.

I’ve not read much of his work, but the few short stories I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed. His work tended to focus on monsters and ghosts.

I’m good with that.

While I like other forms of horror, these types of stories are among the ones I prefer.

Chetwynd-Hayes was rather prolific at short lengths. At novel length, not so much. The ISFDB lists eleven novels. It lists twenty-four collections. I’m not going to count the number of individual short stories. There were a lot.

This isn’t surprising. When Chetwynd-Hayes started writing, the market for horror was primarily in short fiction. Personally, I prefer my horror to be at shorter lengths than novels. While I can appreciate and enjoy a good horror novel, there’s something about the punch a short story delivers that novels rarely pull off.

Sadly, his books are out of print. He was a British writer, so a number of them weren’t published in the United States. That makes them hard to find. Another thing that makes his collections hard to find is that some were published in the seventies, with the first  appearing in 1971, That would be The Unbidden.

The good news is that many of his short stories are available in anthologies that are in print or are easy to get copies of. Not nearly even half of what he wrote, but his work is not completely unavailable. You’ll just have to hunt for them.

But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

It would be nice if someone would publish a large retrospective collection of his work. Preferably one that the average reader can afford.