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Post by dem bones on Oct 12, 2009 18:23:05 GMT
John Gordon - Gilray's Ghost (Walker, 1995) Julek Heller Blurb: "One of your pupils is dead and another, I think, is in danger." "What kind of danger?" "Great danger. A ghost doth yearn to take her life away."
In a tomb in the forest, lies the body of evil necromancer Doctor Septimus Carr, whose grisly experiments claimed the life of a servant girl. Now, two centuries later, another girl is in mortal danger. Enter Gilray. This quirky time traveller has flown back to prevent the looming wickedness. But it's no simple task. For a start, who is the girl — Linda Blake, Pauline Withers, Cassandra Ashe ... ? Their teacher — flirtatious Bob Wheatley — is the man whose help Gilray needs most, but he's preoccupied with passionate affairs of his own. Meanwhile, the sinister Rosa and Robin Underleaf are planning to resurrect their "Master"...
Thrilling, intricate, highly entertaining, this tale of horror and desire builds to an intense and chilling climax.Scuttling to the top of the to-read pile. It was Julek Heller's artwork that lured me. Only after sparing the title a second disinterested glimpse did i realise this novel was 'must have' for another very good reason. John Gordon. Ramsey Campbell rates his The Burning Baby & Other Ghosts a "major collection." Rosemary Pardoe salutes Kroger's Choice (Deborah Shine's Haunting Ghost Stories, Octopus, 1980) as the first and possibly only, M. R. Jamesian Sci-Fi tale. Reprinting the title story and Never Grow Up in Years Best Horror Stories XIII, Karl E. Wagner described host collection, Catch Your Death (Walker, 1992), as "a superior book of horror stories." Yet another universally popular contemporary horror legend - me - wonders if he's ever read a story that upset him quite as much as the horribly realistic Never Grow Up? This is not bad going when you consider Gordon's work is predominately marketed as "ghost stories for children" (in his case, it's most likely children between the ages of 10 and 100 years old) And what's the deal with this "flirtatious Bob Wheatley" character? Rosemary Pardoe's interview with John Gordon ( Ghosts & Scholars, #21) appears online at Ghosts & Scholars
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 12, 2009 22:11:28 GMT
Ooh, nice and nasty cover.
I haven't read this one, but JG's "The Flesh Eater", "The Burning Baby" collection and, particularly, "The House on the Brink", are all excellent books. He's one of those very good authors of childrens' fiction who realises that writing for children doesn't equate with being childish.
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Post by jamesdoig on Oct 13, 2009 8:17:01 GMT
Agreed about The house on the Brink - in her celebrated bibliography of MR James inspired fiction, The James Gang, Rosemary Pardoe writes, "one of the best novel-length ghost stories and supremely Jamesian." Vivid fenland descriptions and great eerie atmosphere. Here's the Peacock paperback, reprinted 1976. This isn't a bad book either, Gordon Honeycobe's Dragon Under the Hill. Arrow, 1973. To Edmund Laidlaw, the holy island of Lindisfarne is an enchanted place - beautiful, remote, full of legend. But it has a terrible and bloody history, as laidlaw discovers when he takes a holiday there with his wife Runa and their young son Erik. Caught between past and present, Laidlaw watches horrified and helpless as a dark remorseless power reaches out from the grave to overwhelm his son and exact a terrible vengeance.
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Post by Dr Strange on Oct 13, 2009 13:50:54 GMT
I read The Giant Under The Snow at primary school - I think I was about 8 or 9 years old - and that was very possibly the first "weird" story I ever read (I don't think that book could really be called "horror"). Sorry to say I haven't read anything else by him - but I may have to rectify that very soon.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 14, 2009 10:09:35 GMT
Ooh, nice and nasty cover. I haven't read this one, but JG's "The Flesh Eater", "The Burning Baby" collection and, particularly, "The House on the Brink", are all excellent books. He's one of those very good authors of childrens' fiction who realises that writing for children doesn't equate with being childish. It pains me to say it but up there with the worst offenders, R. Chetwynd-Hayes for the contributions under his own name to the Armada Monster books (for some reason, his work for the same series as 'Angus Campbell' is nowhere near as icky). i've liked everything of John Gordon's i've read, and like it a lot, but scandalously, that amounts to a pitiful six short stories - the most recent being The Night Watch via Stephen Jones' ( Mammoth Best New Horror 18). Catching up on a novel or three is long overdue. Very pleased to see he has his admirers on Vault!
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Post by dem bones on Mar 20, 2011 20:51:28 GMT
John Gordon - The Burning Baby & Other Ghosts (Walker, 2000: originally 1992) The Burning Baby Under The Ice The Key Eels Death WishBlurb: "The glowing ashes turned again and then, from the centre, there arose a small entity, a little shape of fire..." A teenage girl disappears mysteriously a few days before bonfire night; two youths out skating see something grisly beneath the ice; an elderly spinster feeds her young charge to the eels... In these five supernatural tales, the spirits of the dead seek to exact a terrifying revenge on those who have wronged them.i have to hold my hand up and admit that, for all the drama-queenery of the opening post, i'm no nearer to starting Gilray's Ghost than the day i landed it. The same can't be said of The Burning Baby: picked up a copy for 25p this morning and am fair tearing through it. The Independent on Sunday reviewer described this 100 pager as "strong meat, but never gratuitously nasty" and i guess he or she has a point - it's not another Sabat: The Graveyard Vultures - but that shouldn't put anyone off. Opener The Burning Baby reads like a contemporary take on de Maupassant's supremely horrible The Case of Louise Roque as concerned villager Bernie Friend organises the search for missing fifteen year old Barbara Pargeter. Even if the general consensus has it that the pregnant schoolgirl has run off to London, Bernie the cheery garage mechanic will not rest until she's found safe and well. Good old Bernie!
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Post by dem bones on Mar 22, 2011 17:51:55 GMT
I keep trying to 'make it new', which is why I don't look for influences and why I write so much about people under the age of twenty. When you are that age, you are as bright as you're ever going to be, as intelligent, and just as likely to be right in an argument as when you're fifty. All you lack is a bit of experience, but you're certainly working like hell at getting it.
However, I expect to stop being adolescent any day now and write a story for grown-up persons, because I like to entertain, to enter into a conspiracy of enjoyment with a reader. If this conspiracy is going to work it's got to have a bit more than cheap thrills - though why anyone should despise a cheap thrill beats me; surely a cheap thrill is a bargain, an added extra.John Gordon, interviewed by Rosemary Pardoe, G & S # 21 (1996), on why he writes for a young audience. You can read the interview in its entirety on the Ghosts & Scholars site. For all that John Gordon writes for the teenage market, this hasn't stopped his stories finding their way into adult horror collections. Karl E. Wagner selected both the title story and the heartbreaking Never Grow Up from Catch Your Death and Other Ghost Stories (Patrick Hardy, 1984, Magnet 1985) for Years Best Horror Stories 13 and Stephen Jones has included a few in various Best New Horrors, including Under The Ice (#4), though I suspect Ramsey Campbell might have been the person to suggest it. Back with The Burning Baby. Once Barbara has dispensed a satisfyingly horrific death to her murderer on bonfire night, it is on to one of Gordon's best known supernatural shorts, Under the Ice, and another spectre with retribution in mind, this one not the least concerned if he takes out an innocent party in the process. Quiet kid Rupert Granger is unusually insistent that schoolfriend David accompany him out onto the frozen fen-lands for skating practice. First they stop off at Rupert's house where his father is so unwelcoming and his mother such a bag of nerves that David already regrets agreeing to tag along. It is now approaching a year since Mrs. Granger's flirtation with her brother-in-law went too far and she's in a panic when her son informs her where they're headed. But Rupert has to show someone what he's seen waiting under the ice and it isn't very pleasant on the eye. Next up, Eels, a 'when seafood attacks!' special which Anthony Horowitz saw fit to include in his Puffin Book Of Horror Stories (Viking, 1994) and he is no bad judge on this evidence. Retired village Head-mistress Ms. Jenny Jervis has a skeleton in her wardrobe. During her year at teacher training college, she enjoyed a fling which resulted in the birth of an unwanted daughter. Mindful that the scandal would terminate her career before it even began, Jenny had the baby quietly adopted. Now all these years later, the child she abandoned has hunted her down and threatens to reveal all unless she agrees to look after her own daughter, ten year old Rosemary, while she goes off gallivanting abroad with her latest boyfriend. By a stroke of good fortune, both the pesky daughter and her lover are killed in an air-crash, so nobody left to prevent Ms Jervis quietly boning her unwanted granddaughter and then dumping the lumps of flesh in the river for the eels to dispose of. The ending, involving a "clammy" hot water bottle, bedsheets with a mind of their own and a ghastly visitor from beyond the grave gives the lie to the Independent critic's "never gratuitously nasty." Three excellent supernatural horror stories out of three and an early 'best thing i read in 2011' contender.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 2, 2011 10:05:27 GMT
The Key: Martin's parents, Joe and May Medlicott are caretakers of the old Hall, empty since the death of dashing Clive Millwood. Village gossip has it that May Medlicott was fair flighty in her day, and that it was May's subsequent pregnancy that drove Clive to take his own life. Martin is convinced that he's Millwood's son and invites his pretty classmate, Sophie, to see the ancestral home he's been cheated of. Sophie has a crush on Martin, but she is about to see a darker side to his personality that will disillusion her for life. He's procured the key to the Gate House where Millwood hung himself and demands she join him on a midnight ghost hunt. When Sophie insists she has to be back home or her parents will worry, he turns on her. Heartbroken at his selfishness and appalled at his open contempt for Joe, the man who raised him as his own, she departs in tears leaving him to investigate the haunted house alone. i am not rotten enough to spoil what comes next, but fans of the recalcitrant bedsheets in "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad .." will surely be up for it. Death Wish: Sixteen year old Emma Boyce despises herself as the plainest girl in her class so she is astonished when handsome Simon Ewart invites her out after a lively common room discussion on sex and death. Simon, who lives at the rectory with his aged father, shows Emma to the lonely spot in the churchyard where pretty Amy Burgess, seventeen, was strangled by her lover in 1977. A rainstorm sees to it that Emma has no option but to stay the night with the creepy rector and his even creepier son who is obsessed with ghosts - not just those of the dead lovers (the killer hung himself), but a cat walled up in the cellar and the mummified pigeons he's rescued from the belfry. initially the ending came as a mild disappointment because it's the one moment in The Burning Baby where i felt Gordon made a concession for the tender years of his target audience, but now i can't shake the final, downright haunting image from my head. kids stuff? maybe, but if, come the end of the year, i've read another collection of supernatural horror stories as strong as these, i will consider myself blessed.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 14, 2011 16:50:27 GMT
I acquired THE BURNING BABY and have read "Under the Ice." I liked it, but if adultery and murder are considered appropriate themes for children's literature, what is the precise definition of "adult" fiction? Meanwhile, my erotic books for children continue to be met with incomprehension, sometimes even hostility, by publishers.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 14, 2011 21:21:27 GMT
alas, JoJo, a prophet is never accepted in his own time, etc.
something i find dead commendable about John Gordon is his refusal to patronise his target audience with childish themes. Anthony Horowitz and even Chris Priestly have their nasty moments but Gordon is maybe the darkest of those (very few) "children's horror" authors i've read. the going can get pretty grim in The Burning Baby but i'd argue there's nothing here quite as sad and downright horrific as Never Grow Up from Catch Your Death. we've come a long, long way from R. Chetwynd-Hayes and his god-awful The Slippity-Slop, The Hoppity-Jump & Co., that's for sure.
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Post by ramseycampbell on Apr 17, 2011 8:47:29 GMT
I'd add Alan Garner as another writer of dark fiction for young folk who never wrote down to them. And how about Lois Duncan, a favourite of our daughter's in her early teens? From Tammy's description of her work I concluded that my book The Influence could probably have been published as teenage fiction with few if any changes.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Apr 20, 2011 17:57:36 GMT
Funny I just finished reading Garner's The Moon of Gomrath, second in his trilogy and exactly that point - that it was an 'adult' read - struck me. Unfortunately, it seemed to me that Garner's worth was more as an innovator and the story felt very worn, slow and dated. Of course, this is reading it as an adult and suffering the morass of cheap imitators since it came out. At the time I thoroughly enjoyed his work.
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Post by mrhappy on Apr 6, 2017 23:11:11 GMT
While reading an anthology the other day I came across one of John Gordon's stories and I am always amazed that he is not better known than he is. I thought I would try and list every short story of his that I knew of and see if anyone here can fill in some gaps. I have read that he has written over 50 short stories so that would leave a handful unaccounted for.
Note: everything marked with a "*" appears in Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon released by Medusa Press in 2006. This rare 500 copy collection features 30 stories and only contains one previously unreleased story - The Night Watch - which, thankfully, was included in Best New Horror 18. Also, some of the anthologies I list may not be the original or only appearance of a story.
Incomplete listing of John Gordon's short fiction:
Core collections-
The Spitfire Grave (1979)
*All the Children Almost Never *Better the Devil You Know *The Broken O Dowser *The Place The Spitfire Grave Vandal *Without a Mark
Catch Your Death (1984)
*Catch Your Death *The Girl Outside *Half a Crown *If She Bends, She Breaks *Joby's Print *Little Black Pies *Never Grow Up *Oh, My Bairn *The Pot of Basil
The Burning Baby (1992)
*The Burning Baby *Death Wish *Eels *The Key *Under the Ice
Uncollected short fiction
Bewitched (The Young Oxford Book of Supernatural Stories edited by Dennis Pepper 1996) *Black Beads (The Mammoth Book of Dracula edited by Stephen Jones 1997) *The Black Prince (A Quiver of Ghosts edited by Aidan Chambers 1987) *Bone Meal (Bone Meal: Seven More Tales of Terror edited by A. Finnis 1995) Day's End {poem} (Off the Coastal Path: Dark Poems of the Seaside edited by Jo Fletcher 2010) *Grandmother's Footsteps (The Random House Book of Ghost Stories edited by Susan Hill 1991) The Hawk (The Oxford Book of Scary Tales edited by Dennis Pepper 1992) The Ivy Man (The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories edited by Dennis Pepper 1988) *The Kissing Gate (The Young Oxford Book of Christmas Stories edited by Dennis Pepper 2001) *Kroger's Choice (Haunting Ghost Stories edited by Deborah Shine 1980) *Left in the Dark (Ghost Stories edited by Robert Westall 1988) *The Night Watch (The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18 edited by Stephen Jones 2007) Sam (Horror at Halloween edited by Jo Fletcher 1999) *The Smile of Eugene Ritter (Beware! Beware! edited by Jean Richardson 1987) The Steel Finger (On the Edge edited by Aidan Chambers 1991) *Uncle Walter (The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares edited by Dennis Pepper 2000) User-Friendly (Twisted Circuits: A Sinister Collection of Hi-Tech Tales edited by Mick Gowar 1987) *Vampire in Venice (13 Again edited by A. Finnis 1995) Whisper to Me (Spook: Stories of the Unusual edited by Bryan Newton 1985) The Whistling Boy (The Methuen Book of Strange Tales edited by Jean Russell 1980)
If anyone knows of any others, please let me know.
Mr. Happy
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Post by ropardoe on Apr 7, 2017 14:19:04 GMT
That's an extremely impressive list, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's complete. I certainly can't add to it, except to say that so many uncollected tales are surely begging for a new collection. Of those uncollected tales, a favourite of mine is "Kroger's Choice" with its marvellous anti-vivisection theme (and a plot which gets scarily closer to reality all the time).
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 7, 2017 17:26:51 GMT
A film version of The Giant Under The Snow has been "in development" for a couple of years now -
www.thegiantunderthesnow.com/index.htm
Some big names on board, but they still seem to be trying to raise the money.
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