The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth (collection)

These stories introduced me in the early 1970s to the dazzling talent that is (or was) Roger Zelazny - who later partly frittered away his time with inconsequential and TOO SHORT! novels, but is here seen in all his awesome potential. Truly brilliant, timeless, and very well worth reading.

The title story alone is worth the collection: he wrote the other-planet fishing story so well, and made his characters so human, that it has stayed with me vividly since I read it in the early 1970s. The visualisation of the monster coming up on the deck of the barge... better than Lovecraft.