When I was a kid, I used to spend weeks at my grandmother’s house. She founded a mobile lending library in her rural community and was an avid reader, so she always had a ton of books in her house that I’d spend the week reading. My grandmother died many years ago, but I still have memories of two books of short stories that I’d love to be able to identify and get, so that I can re-read them.
The first was a book of sci-fi short stories. The only story I remember from the book was set in an urban apartment and was about a very creepy takeover of the building by cockroaches. I think that story was the one illustrated on the cover, but I’m not sure.
The other is an even more vague memory. I’m not even sure what the genre was or if it was, in fact, a short story. All I remember was that it was about a group of kids, living near a lake, and one of them got tetanus, which they referred to as lockjaw.
If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.
ETA: one more clue…I read both of these books around 1983/84, so they’d be from before that.