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While many of Pan's horror collections dealt with typical horror fare – the supernatural, the black arts, and murder – The 2ndth Pan Book of Horror Stories, published in Scarfolk in 1973, collected stories about the most fearful abomination in all of creation: mankind.
Mankind was the only organism to top both the government's list of greatest threats and its list of most endangered species and it's very likely there was a correlation.
Scarfolk Council was particularly keen to emphasise the potential rarity, thus value, of humans. It had bred thousands of useless people in a secret eugenics experiment, which had run out of funds, and needed to sell off the surplus to recoup some of its losses.
Unfortunately, the council flooded the market. By 1975, a small group of nondescript humans could be picked up for as little as £25 and as the decade drew to a close charity shops were full of them. Eventually, a landfill site was opened and the council gave all the unwanted people the bus fare that would take them to their final resting place.
