In direct defiance of the title, I read DON’T OPEN THIS BOOK!, editor Marvin Kaye’s impressive collection of suspense stories old and new, all dealing with the forbidden and the unknown, and not a single one of which I’d read before.
Among the best were Issac Asimov’s “Obituary,” about a hateful time-traveling scientist with a devious scheme up the ol’ proverbial sleeve; Edward Hoch’s exploding-mail mystery, “The Problem of the Country Mailbox;” and H.P. Lovecraft’s underwater terror tale, “The Temple.” Others contributing stories include Arthur C. Clarke, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Bloch.
With the exception of three of the 39 stories 
(one of which, “The Testament of Magdalen Blair,” is an utterly disturbing work from renowned Satanist Aleister Crowley), I really enjoyed it. Its mix of horror, dark fantasy and mystery combined with a mix that eschews reprinting the usual make for an anthology that’s thankfully not your average one.
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“The Testament of Magdalen Blair” by Aleister Crowley is a very important piece, for it shows the reader in very clear terms the truth that we create our own realities. Here Crowley animates, and rather infernally, Dante’s cartoonish vision of Hell, and also draws upon traditional Biblical understandings of punishment in the afterlife. That Crowley stood unameliorated in his anger toward the Christian dominant paradigm becomes very clear in this story, but herein is also shown his weakness. A very good, precise writer, he reveals that his magic(k) could not deliver a new vision of the Inferno, and could not reinterpret the book of Revelation from a non-enraged position. Simply put, with all of his knowledge, Crowley fails to write anything other than an intellectual rant against a view of Eternity held by the loudest so-called Christians, and so reveals his true love of the hatred espoused by these alleged followers of Christ. But that is Satanism summed up anyway, isn’t it? Not a carving of a new reality altogether, but the playing of the anti-hero with inverted crucifixes, “black” masses, and silly stories about people burning in hell until their brains finally decay or are blown out with dynamite.