Terrible. I do not recommend this book to anyone. Had I read this collection without knowing it was horror I would have said it was about mental illness or being bored to death.Nightflier - Stephen King2 - Didn't get good till the last couple pages. Sometimes King writes a ton of boring filler, this is one of those timesHaving A Woman At Lunch - Paul Hazel2.5 - Not sure why they cannibalized her, were they always cannibals?The Blood Kiss - Dennis Etchison2 - The script was better than the storyC...

There was some really good stuff and some other stuff I wasn't sure why it was here, because it seemed mostly fantasy.However, stories by King, Etchison, Barker, Morrell, and Straub raised the level very high. Overall very good.

Pretty good old school horror anthology. The only stories I didn’t like much were the David Morell story Orange is for Anguish, Blue is for Insanity and the King offering. The Morrell is highly derivative and then totally ruined by a hackneyed explanation at the end, eliminating whatever eeriness there was. The Clive Barker story showed, once again, that he used to be able to write something really interesting and actually horrifying. The Peter Straub story had nary a supernatural scent but was

I read this collection lo those many years ago (20 years ago, maybe???) because Stephen King was part of it. But then random things remind me of one of the most haunting and painful stories I have ever been put through. I always thought SK wrote the story. Thanks to modern technology, I'm able to track the book down for GoodReads. "Prime Evil" is the title of the book of collected stories. SK's contribution was great. (I thought I was talking to a friend about his story, "The Night Flier," and s...

By far the best collection of short horror I’ve ever read. Besides the obvious kings of the genre, Straub, Campbell, Barker, and King himself, the second tier of authors are all exceptional as well. Except for Etchison’s entry, all the stories are original. “Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity” by David Morrell was my favorite and was super creepy. Excellent story and a surprise to me having read only his thrillers previously. I easily convinced all my fellow readers to check this book out

an ARC i found in a used book store. Got some good ones mixed in there.

Only "The Night Flier","Popsy"qqqqqqqqqq

Unfortunately, the majority of these stories are mediocre, including Stephen King's "The Night Flier," which is just okay. However, I absolutely loved the last 4 stories (along with Clive Barker's "Coming To Grief," which is uncharacteristically subtle but still has some original creepy images and witty insights). "Alice's Last Adventure" has now turned me on to the psychological prowess of Thomas Ligotti. I read up on him after and discovered the controversy of people thinking Matthew Mcconaugh...

I picked this up to read "The Night Flier" by Stephen King, which was really pretty good! A bloody vampire story that gets pretty crazy! And as a treat for King fans, the story has a little tie-in with both "Salem's Lot" and "The Dead Zone"! Small, but fun!The rest of this book is not my cup of tea. Only "Spinning Tales With the Dead" by Charles L. Grant, was decent. The other 11 were, in my opinion, not worth reading. And, in fact, Peter Straub's "The Juniper Tree" should not be read at all! Th...

The Night Flier by Stephen King - A sleazy journalist investigates a investigates a "vampire" with a private plane and a taste for blood. Fun, lightweight page-turner. 3.5 StarsHaving a Woman For Lunch by Paul E. Hazel - Cannibalism and gender politics mingle when a woman enter the male-dominated workforce. Bland, but gains points for the grisly ending. 2.5 StarsThe Blood Kiss by Dennis Etchison - Fun, fast-paced tale of showbiz, revenge, and death. 4 StarsComing to Grief by Clive Barker - A wom...

Overall, I didn't really like this collection. It doesn't really live up to the premise of the collection being a "horror" collection in my humble opinion. Some stories just feel like off-color odds and ends that wouldn't fit into an author's other anthologies. Others were just bad. There were a few good stories here, though not all of them were "horror" in my understanding of the genre.My favorites from this set include:"Coming to Grief" by Clive Barker ***"Food" by Thomas Tessier ****"Orange i...

My top 3:Having a woman for lunch-snappy, sick little twist at the endComing to Grief: A longer story that I just loved.Orange is for Anguish, Blue is for Insanity: LOVED this story! I kind of had an idea where the story was going but I loved it all the same!The rest were ok...usually I love Stephen King's stuff, but The Night Flyer has never been one of my favorites.Side note: I thought the intro was VERY interesting and well worth a read!

Just finished this. WONDERFUL stories in here, by the masters. A must-read for horror fans and aspiring horror writers....

Not the first time I've read this book but the other time I only read three of the stories inside it and didn't read the rest. This time I read almost the entire thing (I didn't finish the last story, Jack Cady's, to the end).A few of the stories in this compilation are definitely going to stick with me, they lingered in my mind after I read them.Here's what I think about each now that I'm finished. Be warned, I do not explain what goes on in the stories, I only say what I felt of each, so if yo...

I read this when it was first released in the late 80s and considered it the best horror anthology I had encountered. Reading it again in 2022, it doesn't hold up as well as I hoped. As others have said, in many ways it no longer feels like horror. I think that says more about the modern mindset than the quality of the stories - how inured we have become to horrors of all kinds when we can call up whatever we want to see with a few twitches of our fingers. So many of these tales require readers

Here's a better than average collection of horror heavyweights from the late 80s, mostly at or near their primes. Stephen King is already starting to show a little slippage in "The Night Flyer," and thinking man's horror writer Thomas Ligotti's house isn't quite in ascendancy, but you get the idea.Rating these things is always subjective (my favorites might be your stinkers, and vice versa), but I'll give my opinion here and present it as if it were fact, as that's what the internet is for. (In

Not going to lie, I skimmed the last story in this book which was a contribution made by Jack Cady. Sorry, not sorry, but it really wasn’t holding my attention at all and I wasn’t about to trudge through a short novel that’s nearly three times the length of the other stories in this book. Now that that’s out of the way, let me just say that for a book entitled “Prime Evil”, I was really expecting so much more. I mean come on, that cover is dope, there are some fairly big names being represented

I only think four stories were well written. The best story is Orange Is For Anguish, Blue for Insanity. Reason of Darkness gets second place, and Next Time You'll Know Me third place. The Juniper Tree was tragic and horrifying (but not the fun kind of horror, the genuinely awful kind of horror).Get yourself a better collection.

I liked this one quite a bit--but most of the stories had the same format: slow burn psychologically-based (if usually still supernatural) horror. Lots of ghosts. If that's the kind of thing you like, you'll find it here.My standouts here were the Clive Barker story and the Jack Cady novella at the end. The Peter Straub story has been in several other anthologies I've read lately, and that's quite good, too.

While some of the stories in this collection were fun to read, if I did not know that this was a collection of horror stories I would of never known. Personally most of the stories dragged on and had little to no "horror" or creep factors. I went into this book ready to feel creeped out and came back very dissapointed. I would not suggest this to someone who really likes to be scared from books but would to people who have just started to dabble in the world of horror.