Is the Earth hollow? Could some of the ancient civilizations actually have possessed knowledge far more sophisticated than our own? Are there lost races of men? And could God himself have been from another planet? These and other extraordinary-questions have inspired many of our finest storytellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And The Ancient Mysteries Reader has collected the best of this fantasy fiction. Here are stories by H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Gerald Kersh, A. Conan Doyle, A. Merritt, Sax Rohmer, Leslie Charteris, and others. Together with editor Peter Haining's historical commentary on each, they offer a unique tour through the most important and exciting theories of extraterrestrial creation. There are eighteen stories in all —many wildly fantastic and imaginative, others more thoughtful and enlightening, still others spine-tingling and terrifying, but all marvelously provocative and entertaining.

The pulp magazines in which the contents of this volume first appeared were a primarily American phenomenon. The stories were written purely as entertainment and were aimed at a readership culled from the American urban population around the turn of the century—often factory workers for whom the glossy magazines would have been too expensive. It was a publisher by the name of Frank Munsey who, in the 1880s, first predicated "the story is more important than the paper it is printed on" and thus revolutionised cheap literature. The glossy magazines were sold in those days for twenty-five cents or more—Munsey's weekly magazine was printed on 128 pages of newsprint, or "pulp", and sold for ten cents. But, true to his dictum, he and his imitators employed the best writers of the day and the stories they wrote were to become the predecessors of science fiction. Among the twenty-one authors represented in this volume are names such as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Dashiel Hammett, Mackinlay Kantor, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury. The pulp magazines flourished for over half a century, but by 1945 paperback books and television had invaded their market and created a demand for more sophisticated reading material. Peter Haining contributes an historical introduction to this collection of fantasy, horror, gothic, adventure, supernatural and embryo SF stories. He also gives a brief introductory note to each story.