It Walks by Night is out now in an annotated Grimbard Press edition, available today on Amazon in ebook and paperback.
John Dickson Carr’s 1930 locked-room horror-mystery just entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Grimbard Press is the first imprint to reissue it with new editorial material built specifically for horror readers, not mystery collectors.
What Is It Walks by Night About?
It Walks by Night opens with a man’s severed head sitting upright in a sealed gambling-house card room, facing a door no one entered or left through. Detective Henri Bencolin has to explain the impossible before the killer decides someone else needs to disappear.
The setting is Fenelli’s, a fashionable gambling house above the Seine in 1920s Paris. Two doors, one window, all three watched the entire time the murder happened. That is the puzzle Carr hands you on page one, and he does not soften it with reassurance that it will make sense later.
Here’s what makes this one worth reading as horror and not just detective fiction:
- The impossible crime, not the clever criminal, is the point. Carr wrote it as a 23-year-old obsessed with the idea that something could not have happened and then happened anyway.
- Bencolin is closer to an exorcist than an inspector. His interrogations read like something out of Poe — the guilt in the room matters more than the evidence in it.
- The book was born from theater, not crime fiction. Carr’s earlier draft, written at Haverford College, was titled Grand Guignol — a direct nod to the Parisian theater (1897–1962) that staged horror through graphic, clinical stagecraft rather than suggestion.
What’s New in the Grimbard Press Edition?
The Grimbard Press edition adds five pieces of original editorial content that don’t exist in any other current printing of the novel. The original 1930 text is untouched — everything new sits around it, not inside it.
This is Grimbard Classics of Horror — No. 2, following The Beetle (1897) as the first title in the series. Each entry gets the same treatment: annotate a public-domain classic that belongs on a horror shelf, not just a mystery or literary-fiction one.
New material in this edition:
- Editorial Introduction — “The Head in the Card Room” — context on Carr, the novel’s 1930 debut, and why it reads as horror wearing a mystery’s structure.
- Author Biography — John Dickson Carr’s life and his run as one of the defining voices of the locked-room subgenre.
- “About This Edition” — a note on the text, sourcing, and what Grimbard Press changed (nothing) and added (the surrounding material).
- “Edgar Allan Poe’s Shadow: Horror and the Locked Room” — an essay tracing the line from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” through Carr’s impossible crimes.
- Suggested Reading — where to go next if this is your entry point into locked-room horror.
The edition also carries 26 new interior illustrations, available in both a full-color deluxe printing and a low-ink black-and-white edition for print-at-home readers.
Where Can You Buy It Walks by Night?
It Walks by Night (Annotated) is available now on Amazon in Kindle ebook and 6×9 paperback, and on Gumroad as a pay-what-you-want ebook and companion art pack.
| Format | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kindle ebook & paperback | Amazon | Live now |
| Ebook — Deluxe (color) + Low-Ink (B&W) editions | Gumroad | Pay what you want, $2 minimum — both editions in one download |
| Illustrated Art Pack — all 52 interior illustrations | Gumroad | Pay what you want, $7 minimum — full color + B&W sets |
Who Is T. P. Grimbard?
T. P. Grimbard writes horror and dark fiction under a pen name built from two instincts: the Bard, a lifelong tabletop storyteller, and the Grim, the part that can’t walk past a haunted house without going in. Grimbard is also the author of There Be Monsters: Then and Now, There Be Monsters: Deep Down, the standalone story Rabbit Season, and the debut novel The Scarab.
If a locked room with a severed head in it is your kind of opening chapter, the same instinct that built this annotated edition runs through The Other by Thomas Tryon — a slow-burn psychological horror novel about twin brothers and the kind of secret a small town keeps without meaning to.
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