Based in L.A., Dark Delicacies is a famous horror-only bookstore. So when that bookstore issues an all-new anthology of its own, using top-notch names in the horror field, you should take notice.

DARK DELICACIES is that book, although you wouldn’t know it from the start. The first two stories don’t exactly set the world afire (Ray Bradbury, too whimsical; Lisa Morton, too rote). But then the mediocrity is rudely shattered by the next story, Whitley Strieber’s polarizing “Kaddish,” which imagines a not-so-distant future where the right-wing “Christians” rule the country with iron fists and huge chunks of racism. It’s not only a great piece of speculative fiction, but an excellent argument for the continuing separation of church and state. Shortly thereafter, the always reliable F. Paul Wilson’s “Part of the Game” reads like a sadly never-made script for TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

But it’s not all greatness from there on out. Brian Lumley’s sci-fi-set “His Thing Friday” is a skewered update on ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, but ultimately just ridiculous, while Ramsey Campbell and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro turn in tales too muddled to be readable. And first-timer Rick Pickman’s “Dark Delicacies of the Dead” – about a book signing turned zombie and werewolf outbreak at this collection’s titular store – is just too self-parodic to be featured alongside established greats like John Farris, William F. Nolan or Richard Matheson (who provides the introduction).

On the plus side, Richard Laymon pulls out his patented sexual-fantasy-laden tricks for “The Diving Girl,” and you have to love him for doing so. Everything I read of his – well, almost everything – is a concrete reminder of how great a hole in the horror world his absence has left.

Then, late in the collection, lies a hat trick of stories so sinister that it nudges DARK DELICACIES into must-have territory. First, current “it” comics writer Steve Niles (30 DAYS OF NIGHT) brings his pill-poppin’ Cal McDonald detective character to prose in “All My Bloody Things,” a gruesomely Grand Guignol mystery that’s more than hard-boiled – it’s scrambled. David J. Schow’s “The Pyre and Others” is about an anthology as rare as it is old, rumored to permeate the dreams and nightmares of its readers. The framework allows Schow not only to tell the story of the book, but also the stories within said book; it’s so good that it deserves to be expanded into longer form.

And last but certainly not least, that ol’ HELLRAISER Clive Barker shows the whole lot of ‘em up with “Haeckel’s Tale.” Old-fashioned in its narrative structure but hardcore where it counts, Barker relates the story of a man’s encounter with a 19th-century necromancer. I haven’t read much Barker in my day, but every time I do, he has never failed to shock, and this one is no exception. One wishes all the stories in DARK DELICACIES had been as envelope-pushing, but I’m pleased to make do with those that did.