alansjf
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 107
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Post by alansjf on Jun 3, 2008 11:21:16 GMT
Best New Horror 6 (Raven, 1995) (cover: Luis Rey) Stephen Jones - Introduction - Horror in 1994 Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dead Babies Harlan Ellison - Sensible City Terry Lamsley - Blade and Bone Norman Partridge - Harvest Charles L. Grant - Sometimes, in the Rain Richard Christian Matheson - Ménage à Trois Joel Lane - Like Shattered Stone Douglas E. winter - Black Sun M. John Harrison - Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring Ian R. MacLeod - The Dead Orchards Elizabeth Massie - What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book Ramsey Campbell - The Alternative Karl Edward Wagner - In the Middle of a Snow Dream Paul J. McAuley - The Temptation of Dr Stein Garry Kilworth - Wayang Kulit Robert Bloch - The Scent of Vinegar Nicholas Royle - The Homecoming Geoffrey A. Landis - The Singular Habits of Wasps Michael Marshall Smith - To Receive Is Better Brian Hodge - The Alchemy of the Throat Kim Newman - Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright... Esther M. Friesner - Lovers Stephen Jones & Kim Newman - Necrology - 1994
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Post by dem bones on Dec 7, 2008 13:05:07 GMT
Spotted a copy of this (and Fritz Leiber's Night Monsters) looking lonely in Quinto's along Charing Cross Road road yesterday, and fondly remembered more of the titles than is usually the case with Best New Horrors, so that was that. Particularly looking forward to a re-read of Terry Lamsley's Blade And Bone which mightily impressed me when it appeared in Ghosts & Scholars 17 and the Karl E. Wagner story. Consulting the Necrology and 1994 was a particularly depressing year with the deaths of modern pulp - yes, pulp! - master Wagner and those veterans of golden age Weird Tales Frank Belknap Long and Robert Bloch.
Robert Bloch - The Scent of Vinegar: "You think sex was invented by Madonna or some hot-dog computer hacks over at Cal Tech? Let me tell you, in the old days we had it all. Straights, gays, bi-, tri-: anything you wanted, you could get. You bring the ladder, we furnish the giraffe."
That's Bernie, reminiscing on his experience of Tinseltown back in '49, to reporter Greg Kolner, 26. Kolner has had it from the lips of a dying bum that up there in the hills stands a derelict whorehouse, once very popular with the beautiful people and notorious for the S&M excesses of its madame. Old Bernie warns him against seeking the place out, but Kolner sees a possibility for neat blackmail opportunities in his discovery as the place was abandoned in haste after the madam was allegedly murdered. Maybe there'll be some files hanging around. Finally locating the trashed old palace in the Hollywood hills, he takes out his torch and explores the several rooms. He's not sure exactly what he'll find, but possibly last on the list is a beautiful Oriental girl draped naked on the bed. A beautiful dead Oriental girl with a spider emerging from between her legs. And then, she opens her eyes and smiles revealing two rows of nice razor teeth. And twists off her head ....
Kolner wisely scarpers and vows never to return, but there's a nasty surprise - in the form of a menacing Malay with a gun - awaiting him when he gets home. This man, Ibraham, is the son of a maid who worked at the brothel during the salad days and he knows what's lurking up there and how it can be destroyed. It is a Penanggalan, a woman's severed head trailing a length of intestine and stomach sac which spends its off duty hours reclining in a tray of vinegar which, as vampires go, certainly knocks liver spots off some befanged, white whiskered letch prancing around London in an opera cape and a straw hat. The Penanggalan's single purpose in unlife is to create others just like it and takes particular delight in stalking pregnant women. But intruders like this pair will do in a crisis ....
Montague Summers mentions this awesome specimen in The Vampire: Its Kith And Kin (Kegan-Paul, 1928) citing Sir Hugh Clifford's 1897 opus In Court and Kampong and W. W. Skeat's Malay Magic (Macmillan, 1900), but it's not exactly prevalent in weird fiction, or at least, the only example I know of is the old master, Seabury Quinn's Malay Horror (Weird Tales, Sept 1933). By the time De Grandin and Trowbridge arrive on the scene, one unfortunate young lady has already been reduced to a head/ intestine/ stomach combo, but the indomitable occult detective was never going to allow a mere trifle like that stand between himself and a happy ending. By means of some intricate surgery (by a dim gas-lamp), he soon had the heroine back in one piece so that you'd never even notice anything untoward had befallen her.
I've yet to come across these fascinating Clifford and Skeat non-fiction titles on my travels, although the former's adventure in necromancy The Ghoul - detailing a graveside ritual in which a stillborn child is temporarily brought back to life for just as long as it takes to have its tongue bitten out - has been reprinted in several horror story anthologies, while his self-explanatory The Were-tiger pops up in Bernhardt J. Hurwood's Monsters Galore (Fawcett, 1969). The aforementioned tongue-job, incidentally, is no gratuitous thing. The grave-robbing hag needed this specific organ to create a Pelesis, a kind of demonic house cricket which works in conjunction with a likewise magically created thumb-size vampire, the Polong - the blood of a murdered man being the all important ingredient should you wish to create one of these. The Peiesis burrows into the chosen victims flesh forging a channel just wide enough for the Polong to squeeze in and between them they reputedly drive their unfortunate host insane!
Um, somehow I appear to have sidetracked myself ....
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Post by dem bones on Dec 10, 2008 12:44:44 GMT
Is it just the distance of a decade or so that makes the early Years Best Horrors more enjoyable than some of the mid-period and later editions, or has Stephen Jones tried to play it too clever, tampering with a winning formula and selecting stories that, to dullards like me, bear little or no resemblance to 'horror stories' as we recognise them? Four stories in , four winners, and i know from previous acquaintance that the Terry Lamsley and Paul J. McAuley offerings are a treat.
Harlan Ellison - Sensible City: There's a touch of the Loughville's about this one as the brutal Police Lieutenant Gropp and his lunk headed henchman Sergeant Mickey Rizzo jump bail when it's clear that the Jury are going to recommend the death penalty for their several torture-murders of convicted felons. Taking a wrong turning on the highway, they drive into a creepy green mist behind which waits the town of Obedience and a ravenous population which has long since mutated into something very other than human ....
Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dead Babies: The authors revenge on Kentucky for the miserable nine years he spent there! Allie Sellers' baby is imminent so she and husband Bill drive over to Dr. Everett in Dawsontown to seek urgent help. Little do they realise that Laura, his eager-to-please sister, has never been the same since she lost her own son - or that her way of confronting bereavement was to dig him straight up after the funeral. But that's the thing with corpses. They tend to go off very quickly ....
Michael Marshall Smith - To Receive Is Better: The latest designer commodity for the affluent, soon-to-be parent is a Spare. Spares are cloned from a fetus and put to one side until such times as the real baby needs a replacement limb or organ. Champion swearer Jack is a Spare. As with his fellow spares, he's hidden from sight in an underground tunnel hoping he won't be required in the operating theatre any time soon. Many of his companions have been down here a long time and they're not in such good shape. Jack's already lost an eye, a leg and most of his gut to his "brother" - and he's one of the lookers. Sometimes the brutal wardens bring friends down to laugh at or even screw the Spares but Manny's not like that. Maybe it's because his wife lost their baby but he empathises and treats the more reachable amputees with compassion. Jack and Sue 2 can talk thanks to him. He even lets them out of the tunnel on occasion. But now Manny's dead and Jack's on the run. He knows he'll be caught and killed, but there's a long-standing personal matter he must attend to.
more;
Terry Lamsley - Blade And Bone: "The corpse looked like someone who'd fallen into a harvester ... as did his wife's body when they found her .... - not quite the words of reassurance you want to hear from a strange old man in a tea-shop when you're convinced that the animated bag of bones responsible is on your trail.
Wormshill, a village in the Peak District, and reluctant antiquarian Ogden Minter, 63, is exploring the church of St. Margaret of Antioch on behalf of his injured wife, Poppy, who's meticulously researched all the places of interest he can research while she spends their holiday recuperating at the Jem Arms. Caught in a fierce rainstorm, Ogden seeks shelter in one of several abandoned cottages where he discovers a 1952 issue of the Radio Times and several strange, possibly ceremonial instruments, the use for which he can only guess at and all his guesses are morbid. It doesn't help that he felt something rush past him as he opened the long-locked door, and a terrible history of protracted torture as explained to him by the aforementioned mystery villager convinces him that he and Poppy should get the hell away from Derbyshire as fast as their legs can carry them.
"As he pressed forward for a closer look, the screen of nettles quivered and parted. Out from behind them the fleshless fragments of three fingers and a thumb, clutching some kind of knife, stretched toward him with the persistence of a hand seeking alms."
The torture scenes were never going to be as explicit as you'll find in a GNS or Laurence James novel, but they're still mighty unsettling and if Ghosts & Scholars ever published a gorier, nastier Jamesian story then I ain't read that issue.
Richard Christian Matheson - Ménage à Trois: Man, woman and knife, merrily doing their own bedroom thing. But there's always someone who'll wind up feeling like they're playing gooseberry ...
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Post by dem bones on Dec 13, 2008 17:09:31 GMT
Saw the title and, when I realised it wasn't a 'When insects attack!' extravaganza, almost skipped it altogether. Just goes to show how wrong you can be. Geoffrey A. Landis - The Singular Habits of Wasps: "I had thought that either Holmes was stalking the Whitechapel killer, or else that Holmes was the killer. Now I suddenly realised that there was yet another alternative: Holmes the detective could be stalking the Whitechapel killer, completely unaware that he himself was the very criminal he sought" Move over, Michael Dibden! Dr. Watson penned a far more plausible 'My colleague, Jack the Ripper' testimony than The Last Sherlock Holmes Story and you can tell this one's true because the sleuth only carved up Mary Kelly and her fellow streetwalkers to save mankind .... from imminent invasion by extra-terrestrials! Early in 1888, a community of tiny, crab spider-like entities animate the corpse of a young man who's had a fatal encounter with a haying machine and send him staggering forth from Surrey to East London. The local ladies' reputation for hospitality has travelled far and wide, and the space mobsters find them to be as obliging as they'd hoped. Holmes, who immediately grasps the situation (with a little help from H. G. Wells) is faced with a terrible dilemma. Either he butcher these unfortunates and retrieve the slime-dripping eggs, "slick and purple," from their insides, or stand by helpless as earth is colonised.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Dec 30, 2008 15:15:30 GMT
BNH 6 is one of my favourites of the series. I'd never read Terry Lamsley before and Blade & Bone is one of his best from 'Conference With the Dead' some of which is superb and some of which I found middling. Best story by far is that 'Singular Habits of Wasps' - classic Holmesian horror. The BBC should film that and not tell anyone it's anything different from the usual classic TV adaptation you get at Xmas time.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 14, 2018 18:50:25 GMT
Elizabeth Massie - What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book: Elliott Mitchell daily soils his clothes in order to be sent home from school and tend his bed-ridden, chain-smoking mother who, we suspect, is shamming. Worst of it is, a girl in his year won a competition to have her painting reproduced on the cover of the local directory. Edward knows he'd have beaten her had only he'd not been sick all the time - the art teacher, Mrs. Pugh, is forever praising his artwork. Frustration and resentment take hold. He removes a kitchen knife from the drawer. If domestic misery porn is your thing, seek no further.
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Post by andydecker on Jun 21, 2019 21:47:29 GMT
I got this as a Kindle a while ago because the price was low. It is kind of strange to read the introductions of all these writers nearly 25 years later. This time I want to follow the order and at least sampling a few pages of each story instead of hopping around and never reading the bulk.
The first six stories are for me a rather mixed lot.
Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dead Babies - A good begining. Shades of TCM without the TC. Still a memorable concept and the ending is effective. Even the pun at the end worked for once. Never did like WAtt-Evans fantasy much, but his pseudonymous novelisations like Predator were not bad.
Harlan Ellison - Sensible City - I will never get the "genius" of Ellison. This is plotless, meandering and doesn't make any sense conceptwise.
Terry Lamsley - Blade and Bone - Never knew the writer, and after the intro I expected some more Jamesian. But I liked it a lot. Great atmosphere, nice plot. The ending is a bit predictable though, but maybe this is due to the passage of time.
Norman Partridge - Harvest - Didn't finish it. The style couldn't grab me at all and I lost interest after a few pages.
Charles L. Grant - Sometimes, in the Rain - While I own a lot of Grant, I haven't read him for 20 years and have mostly forgotten his plots. I tried an early Oxrun novel recently and thought it a bore. But this is a nice ghost story.
Richard Christian Matheson - Ménage à Trois - Typically 90s pretentiousness.
To be continued... hopefully.
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Post by andydecker on Jun 23, 2019 21:23:39 GMT
Onward with this: Joel Lane - Like Shattered Stone: One of those artists horror tales. The atmosphere is quite good in parts, but on the whole this doesn't work. The protagonist is a rather unsuccessful sculptor whose girlfriend has ditched him. In his sleep he suddenly does some wonderful sculpting work. Then he sees dead homeless people in the cold, but among the dead is his girlfriend. He tries to comfort her, but she melts. What this had to do with the sculpting I frankly didn't understand. Douglas E. Winter - Black Sun: Another grim'n'gritty splatterpunk (light) post-apocalyptic tale. A gunman comes to the post-apocalyptic burning city and does things among the apocalyptic streets. I have read this two days ago and have trouble remembering the plot. I used to like the splatterpunks, but today I am mostly bored and can't see the point. M. John Harrison - Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring:-And now for something different. Harrison's tale of a doomed relationship is more near-future sf than horror, but thanks to its writing it works very well. I can easily understand how horror fans may not like this. The narrator Mick Rose who is called China has a dubious transport service for high-risk medical stuff like virus. He has a relationship with Isobel, who wants to fly. Isobel ditches him for experimental surgeon Alexander who changes people into the body they want. Isobel wants to become a bird. (As is revealed only at the end). But Isobel can't cope with the operation and goes back to China, who accepts her even for her new body and her different personality. It all ends in tears, of course. Maybe I am using the description pretentious to often and lightly on those deliberate "literary" efforts, and the title fits the bill a bit. Or more, depending on your taste. (Or I am missing the finer points of the language, always a possibility) But the story is so well constructed, Harrison is so skillfull telling this that I had no trouble finishing this rather long story. I like literary fiction when it is well done, and Harrison doesn't disappoint. Ian R. MacLeod - The Dead Orchards: This is in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith. The narrator is living in this foul city and the only pleasure in his life is giving his guests a magic drug which immobilizes them. Then he cuts them apart while they are conscious and ditches them in the Dead Orchards where they fuse with the trees. When he finds a truly beautiful girl in this ugly world and falls in a kind of love, things don't end well. MacLeod cites Lovecraft and his Dreamland stories as an inspiration, but I was more reminded of CAS. To recreate these worlds and atmosphere is not easy, but MacLeod succeeds quite well.
To be continued ...
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Jun 24, 2019 1:04:27 GMT
Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dead Babies - A good beginning. Shades of TCM without the TC. Still a memorable concept and the ending is effective. Even the pun at the end worked for once. Never did like Watt-Evans fantasy much, but his pseudonymous novelisations like Predator were not bad. I have a soft spot for his Ethshar series, which has a strong D&D feel crossed with the "logical fantasy" style of L. Sprague de Camp (though Watt-Evans actually seems to give a damn about his characters, which I never felt was the case with de Camp). I read the first three-- The Misenchanted Sword (my favorite among them), With a Single Spell, and The Unwilling Warlord--as a teenager, though I didn't I read the next five until just a few years ago, and there are several more I've never gotten around to reading. They often go off in unexpected directions, which I appreciate.
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Post by mcannon on Jul 1, 2019 6:50:15 GMT
Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dead Babies - A good beginning. Shades of TCM without the TC. Still a memorable concept and the ending is effective. Even the pun at the end worked for once. Never did like Watt-Evans fantasy much, but his pseudonymous novelisations like Predator were not bad. I think that the only fiction by Watt-Evans I've read was a couple of his short stories. However, quite some years ago he wrote an excellent article on American Pre-Code horror comic books other than those published by EC, titled "The Other Guys". It was the first time I'd read much on many of these books and publishers, and is available on Watt-Evans' website, at www.watt-evans.com/theotherguys.shtmlThe article still makes for pretty entertaining reading, particularly as so much of the material it references is now available from reprints and online sources. Mark
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