VOR

Avon paperback, fifth printing, April 1970. Cover by Don Crowley.

"FIRST CONTACT! 

The glowing ovoid plummeted earthward, the sky screaming like a metallic banshee as the air boiled away from its sides. 

A supersonic boom broke over the forest. The curious thing glided down; earth fountained away from it like water, and the forest burst into flame! 

Then a thin black line etched a circle on the side of the metal egg; the circle thickened into a door, or airlock; the air was rent by a searing, screaming hiss and suddenly - the strange being soon to be known to all mankind as 

VOR 

emerged...."

STRANGE RELATIONS

Panther SF paperback, 1973. Artist uncredited.

"Philip José Farmer is one of the handful of authors who made science fiction grow up. Unlike so many other sf writers, he has never been afraid to explore to the furthest limits of the bizarre, terrifying and grotesque the implications of man's contact with completely alien life-forms in outer space. In this outstanding collection of brilliantly disturbing stories man meets alien in a weird variety of ways. The results of these encounters will shock, startle and astound you. They will also open your mind to a new awareness of the rance of experience available to man in an infinite universe..."

Contents:

Mother
Daughter
Father
Son
My Sister's Brother

Today was definitely a day for oddball book covers - I bought this at the same time (and place) that I got Philip Bedford Robinson's Masque Of A Savage Mandarin.

MASQUE OF A SAVAGE MANDARIN

Panther Science Fiction paperback, 1974. Artist uncredited,
possibly Bob Haberfield.

"Nicholas Coad, the Savage Mandarin: detached, scientific, 'converted' into a state of 'sublime, cosmic indifference'. He is working on a unique project - the 'conversion' and liberation of the soul or higher self from chains of physical bondage. His 'patient' is his good-natured neighbour, Rogers, up-and-coming ad-man. Rogers does not realise that his piercing headaches are caused by the fearsome, hypnotic in coad's flat. But as coad brings him further along the path to liberation, he has no choice. After all, his brain now resembles a chunk of Gruyére cheese..."

Well, you don't see a book cover like that every day (!) the artwork looks familiar but I can't place a name. Haven't read this one yet (like so many others - my 'reading list' is seven feet tall) but judging from the synopsis on the back cover, it's the literary equivalent of taking a few 'shrooms. Thanks to Mark for suggesting the cover artist might be Bob Haberfield, it looks psychedelic enough to be his work to me!