Robert H. Waugh, a leading critic and scholar of weird, fantasy, and science fiction, has in the past decade quietly demonstrated his skill as a weird fictionist of luminous prose and powerful supernatural concepts. This first collection of his tales exhibits the wide range of his talents, containing such gems as The Hot Tub Horror, telling of the bizarreries a man finds in a jacuzzi Yet Here's a Spot, where anomalous and ever-moving spots appear on a man's body Mr. Hoffman's Cat, about a mysterious feline and its even more mysterious owner Playing with Fire, a story of psychological aberration about a pyromaniac and the title story, a riveting tale of sea horror. brWaugh is particularly adept at evoking the terror inherent in towns weighted down by centuries of tradition as in The Churches on the Hill, evoking the strangeness of the upstate New York town of New Paltz, where Waugh long resided, and he is just as skilled at fusing horror and pathos, as in the plangent narratives The Win