|
Post by piglingbland on Apr 12, 2012 9:07:27 GMT
David Sutton's Shadow Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales by Richard Davis (1935-2005). The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales ("Writers from the Shadows #1") Shadow Publishing 2012 Paperback 240 pages, £7.99 ISBN: 978-0-9539032-4-5 Cover Artwork by Caroline O'Neal Richard never saw a collection of his stories published in his lifetime and this book includes all of the author's short stories, culled from as far back as 1963 and 'The Fourth Pan Book of Horror Stories' up to the 1980s. The collection contains an introduction about his life, the fiction and anthologies, including his work as story editor for the BBC's Late Night Horror series. The book will also feature two rare articles and an interview with the author, from the late 1960s. "At the time I interviewed Richard for my small press magazine in 1969, he was already an established short story writer, had compiled two anthologies for Tandem Books and the BBC series Out of the Unknown, for which he worked as assistant story editor, had been on air since 1965... Yet, some forty plus years later, Richard’s fiction has largely been forgotten. Although not prolific, he was widely published in anthologies in England. Yet he never saw a collection of his tales published during his lifetime. Hence this book and its integration into a projected series under the collective tag, Writers from the Shadows." (From the Introduction). Contents: Introduction by David A. Sutton The Female of the Species Elsie and Agnes A Day Out The Lady by the Stream The Inmate A Nice Cut off the Joint Guy Fawkes Night The Time of Waiting The Sick Room The Clump The Nondescript What We Were Looking for in Horror An Interview with Richard Davis Horror in Fiction Bibliography The cover artist is the painter and illustrator Caroline O'Neal. Caroline has done dark fantasy illustration for Bad Moon Books, Premonitions and Midnight Street magazines, among others. More Information: Personal website: davidasutton.co.uk/Question.htmlShadow Publishing site: www.shadowpublishing.webeasysite.co.ukFollow my blog at: shadowpublishing.blogspot.co.ukAttachments:
|
|
|
Post by David A. Riley on Apr 12, 2012 10:23:20 GMT
I don't know most of these stories, so reading this collection should be a real treat. especially if they're even half as good as Guy Fawkes Night.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Apr 12, 2012 19:37:32 GMT
Thanks for the update, Mr. Piglingbland! Very pleased it's fallen to the late Mr. Davis to get the series under-way. I think you should consider a collection of your own as Clinically Dead ignores much of the early material and there were some real belters among 'em (always had a soft spot for The Fetch myself). please check your private messages ....
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 6, 2012 7:20:46 GMT
Richard Davis - The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales: Writers from the Shadows #1 (Shadow Publishing, April 2012) Caroline O'Neal Introduction by David A. Sutton
The Female of the Species Elsie and Agnes A Day Out The Lady by the Stream The Inmate A Nice Cut off the Joint Guy Fawkes Night The Time of Waiting The Sick Room The Clump The Nondescript
What We Were Looking for in Horror An Interview with Richard Davis Horror in Fiction BibliographyBlurb: STORIES OF TERROR & THE SUPERNATURAL
Jim's beautiful wife Viola is dead, but she had hidden a terrible secret... and now the cat he had brought home for her is behaving very strangely...
Mary and Johnny were hoping for a lovely weekend in the bed-and-breakfast by the sea, but there was something not quite right about their room... definitely not right at all!
Agnes was so annoying that her sister Elsie just had to kill her. But that was not the end of it, for Agnes has returned... or has she?
Richard Davis was the story editor for the BBC's LATE NIGHT HORROR series and the editor of the landmark THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, as well as many other horror anthologies, including the TANDEM HORROR, SPACE, SPECTRE and ARMADA SCI-FI series.
His short stories were widely published, but THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES is the first time his fiction has been collected in one volume.
The book also contains two rare essays by the author. Such a shame that Richard Davis didn't live to see his stories compiled, as this 230 page collection, celebrating his across-the-board contribution to terror fiction - he wasn't keen on "horror" - makes for the most worthy of tributes. Female Of The Species is an appropriate title if ever was. Deadly women, primarily sexually repressed spinsters of a certain age, predominate from the first. We meet Viola, a closet Black Magician, and Helen, the friendly neighbourhood cannibal. Elisabeth the cradle-snatcher and her ghastly mother. Mrs. Hayter, whose seething resentment unleashes a poltergeist on a seaside guest house. Elsie and Agnes bad case of sibling rivalry transcends the grave - or so it first appears. While the less said about Linda's attachment to husband Tom's pet gorilla .... By way of variation, The Nondescript sees a half-monkey half-merman wreak havoc on village pond-life. A Day Out is a deceptively gentle ghost story. And then there's the disappearance of a vicious country squire on Guy Fawkes Night. Strong as the stories are, it's the non-fiction material - Mr. Sutton's biography and bibliography, the two Davis essays, a Shadow interview from 1967 - give the book that bit extra. I also like how it throws up a mystery or two, namely "was Richard Davis 'Philip Buffy Welby'?" and which story did Davis reject outright for Late Night Horror on the grounds that it was set in a German Concentration Camp? You don't think Sir Charles Birkin had the audacity to send him ..... ? Some notes on the stories: The Female Of The Species: Told in diary form. Narrator Jim, a sales rep, rescues a ginger kitten from being trampled underfoot at Portobello Road Market. The kitten adopts him as its owner. Jim can't wait to show kitty off to his dear, devoted wife Viola when she returns from Oslo (typical of Vi, she's flown out to care for her useless brother Robin who has contracted pneumonia). But Viola doesn't make it back. She's incinerated when her plane crashes over the channel. It is only after the funeral can Jim bring himself to sort through Viola's things and that's when he makes the startling discovery that her "harmless" interest in books on witchcraft, black sorcery and the transmigration of souls was anything but. Maybe Robin is right to refer to his late sister as "evil" - it now seems abundantly clear that she'd lied to and cheated on Jim as a matter of course. The kitten, meanwhile, is getting kind of big ... The Lady By The Stream: Miss Elisabeth Wilson, who has spent her forty-six years skivvying for a manipulative invalid mother, develops an unhealthy interest in Tom Andrews, a beautiful and charming ten year old who's father owns the village sweet shop. When her mother learns that Elisabeth has been taking the boy on day trips to London, she warns that people will talk (they certainly will if Mrs. Wilson has anything to do with it). For the first time in her life, Elisabeth, whose obsession with Tom is growing creepier by the day, defies the spiteful old harridan. The consequences are tragic as they are crushingly inevitable. A Nice Cut Off The Joint: Construction engineer Tom Simpson and Helen, his wife of ten years, have just returned to England from the Brazilian jungle, and Helen in particular is finding it hard to get used to the food. All that insipid frozen stuff everybody buys from the supermarket nowadays just doesn't do it for her. She had been the most promising medical student of her year, and, her flair for surgery came in handy on the Amazon when she saved the life of a tribal leader. As a reward, she was initiated into voodoo, which has left her a craving for raw meat .... The Sick Room: When her husband Albert is invalided out of the army, the embittered Elsie Hayter reluctantly opens a seaside guest house which she decorates after her own appalling taste. Right from the start there's a big problem with 'the Victorian Room'. First the painter slips and breaks his back, dying in hospital shortly afterward when complications set in. Then a young couple come to spend their first ever dirty weekend and it all turns boy butchering girl. The room acquires a dreadful reputation which, as Albert predicts, appeals to ghouls such as the recently divorced Mrs. Walsingham who rents it for herself and her cutesy little Pekingese. The dog rips out her throat. Can respected medium Mrs. Forrester rid the place of it's demonic presence? More to follow ....
|
|
|
Post by DemonSpawn on May 6, 2012 18:38:39 GMT
That's one creepy cover.
I am personally a fan of cats, but for some reason horror stories involving them creep me right out...
Shall be on the look out for this one!
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 6, 2012 18:59:14 GMT
Mr. Sutton mentions that the cat story was filmed as Viola but only a very select few have ever seen it. That will be everybody on the board 'cept me then.
Elsie And Agnes: "Harry!" Agnes exploded into laughter. "You'd never have married Harry in a thousand years! You were terrified of sex. He told me. It was pathetic!" More fear and loathing behind the lace curtains. A lifetimes enmity toward her vindictive, crippled sister Agnes finally explodes in violence and Elsie garrottes the old cow and hides her in the cellar. As Elsie dithers over the disposal of the body, Aggie's ghost torments her, sneering that she'll never get away with it, better that she commit suicide and have done with it. A mini Whatever Happened To Baby Jane with an effective if predictable sting in its tail.
A Day Out: The randy young proprietor of a seaside amusement arcade chats up a nice bit of London crumpet and invites her down to spend the weekend at Angleford. Picture his delight when his dolly-bird arrives with her parents, kid brother and sister and a dotty aunt, all of them geared up for a nice day out by the sea. Our man still wangles a few hours of red hot passion, but he's a little miffed when the family return to London and not even a 'thank you' card for his trouble. When next he visits the smoke, he determines to look them up. A spooky discovery awaits.
The Inmate: Fort William in the Western Highlands. Bob, young, filthy rich and bored, decides his estate should have its own zoo, and travels the world in search of exotic pets. His wife Linda, an Edinburgh society beauty, isn't particularly enthralled, but has a change of mind when he returns from the Congo with a handsome gorilla. Linda is big on reincarnation and recognises the great beast as her mate from a previous incarnation. They become very close. Very close indeed.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 8, 2012 16:01:17 GMT
Guy Fawke's Night: Davis's breakthrough story, likely his best and certainly the most famous. Have tried not to go too spoiler heavy, but you know how these things go.
Mr. Thomas, Squire of Tedham village, is an ill-tempered brute with a cruel streak and a zero tolerance approach to poachers. He once set a ring of fire around a copse to smoke out three poultry thieves, one of whom soon died from the burns he sustained. The old bastard wishes his shy, bookish son David would be less of a namby pamby and more like himself. For his part, David - a future Harley Street specialist - despises his father as a bully, and the hatred intensifies when his beloved dog Rusty meets his death in a man-trap. And then, during the village bonfire celebrations on Guy Fawke's night, 1919, Squire Thomas vanishes, presumed run off with one of his floozies. His wife suffers a mental collapse from which she never recovers.
It takes David's one childhood friend, Jerry Williams, all of four decades to piece together what really happened that night, by which time he wishes he hadn't.
A quick non-fiction intermission, Horror in Fiction, as read by Mr. Davis when he appeared on a 200 Years Of Horror panel alongside Mary Danby, Sir C. Lee, and Philip Strick of the BFI at a London 'Book Bang', in 1971, makes for fascinating reading. As you might expect, it's part appreciation of his literary idols (Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James,"one of the genre's greatest assets, H. P. Lovecraft" among the old guard, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley of the new), and part commentary on then contemporary trends. It seems just as today's 'horror lite' brigade are the whipping boys and girls of the piece, back in 1971 commentators were bemoaning the trend toward what they perceived as "revolting" horror, "horror for its own sake, using a titillating mixture of sexual perversion and violence," and wondering at the morals and general disposition of those who could possibly enjoy same. Indeed, "if we were not careful", there might come a day when this unsavoury material would usurp the "real thing"! Reading this impassioned and doubtless sincere essay, it's not impossible that Davis stopped contributing to The Pan Book Of Horror Stories when he realised the course Van Thal had settled upon. Clearly, the Vault-that-dare-not-speak-it's-name would have been even less welcome in Mr. Davis' day than it is now, but is it really so wrong to appreciate, say, both Robert Aickman and John Halkin, or Guy N. Smith and L.T.C. Rolt, or Pierce Nace and Ramsey Campbell, or, come to that, The Mammoth Book Of Paranormal Romance and A Book Of Horrors? Discuss, or not, as you feel inclined.
|
|
|
Post by Shrink Proof on May 8, 2012 18:12:04 GMT
Clearly, the Vault-that-dare-not-speak-it's-name would have been even less welcome in Mr. Davis' day than it is now, but is it really so wrong to appreciate, say, both Robert Aickman and John Halkin, or Guy N. Smith and L.T.C. Rolt, or Pierce Nace and Ramsey Campbell, or, come to that, The Mammoth Book Of Paranormal Romance and A Book Of Horrors? Discuss, or not, as you feel inclined. OK, I'm gullible enough to pick this one up.... IMPO, no it's not wrong to like works from different ends of the spectrum as it were. I think that folk get too precious, sometimes to the point of pretentiousness. Not that this trait's confined to the world of horror fiction & other Vault-filling stuff. It can also be seen in areas such as music - who, for instance, would set fire to their street cred by publicly confessing to liking both Julian Cope's Brain Donor and Duran Duran? Surely that sort of sixth-form snobbery's crap - you like what you like. Just because I don't like something it doesn't mean it's got no merit for anyone else. The point (if there is one) is that people tend to like different things for different reasons. I like M R James' stuff in a completely different way to how I like someone like, say, Michael Marshall Smith. They do completely different things to me. In fact, in different settings I'm more likely to reach for one sub-genre or another to get the effect I want. We all do to some extent & sometimes this becomes cliched, like people being expected to put on a Beach Boys album in summer or read M R James at night in winter by the fire. I may not know much about Art, but I know what I like...
|
|
|
Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 8, 2012 18:59:28 GMT
is it really so wrong to appreciate, say, both Robert Aickman and John Halkin, or Guy N. Smith and L.T.C. Rolt, or Pierce Nace and Ramsey Campbell, or, come to that, The Mammoth Book Of Paranormal Romance and A Book Of Horrors? Of course not! Just as long as everything is pre-1983 or so.
|
|
|
Post by DemonSpawn on May 8, 2012 19:58:04 GMT
Guy Fawke's Night: is it really so wrong to appreciate, say, both Robert Aickman and John Halkin, or Guy N. Smith and L.T.C. Rolt, or Pierce Nace and Ramsey Campbell, or, come to that, The Mammoth Book Of Paranormal Romance and A Book Of Horrors? Discuss, or not, as you feel inclined. I really can't see the problem. Don't really see why people can only read one type of book, or listen to one type of music or watch one type of telly program. Sounds very boring to me!
|
|
|
Post by ramseycampbell on May 8, 2012 21:01:32 GMT
is it really so wrong to appreciate, say, both Robert Aickman and John Halkin, or Guy N. Smith and L.T.C. Rolt, or Pierce Nace and Ramsey Campbell, or, come to that, The Mammoth Book Of Paranormal Romance and A Book Of Horrors? Of course not! Just as long as everything is pre-1983 or so. Perhaps you've borne the passing of the years better than some of us.
|
|
|
Post by ramseycampbell on May 8, 2012 21:06:12 GMT
"I also like how it throws up a mystery or two, namely "was Richard Davis 'Philip Buffy Welby'?" and which story did Davis reject outright for Late Night Horror on the grounds that it was set in a German Concentration Camp? You don't think Sir Charles Birkin had the audacity to send him ..... ?"
It may have been something by C. S. Forester - I recall Richard condemning a Forester tale that had that setting (which I thought pretty restrained myself).
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on May 8, 2012 21:33:28 GMT
It seems just as today's 'horror lite' brigade are the whipping boys and girls of the piece, back in 1971 commentators were bemoaning the trend toward what they perceived as "revolting" horror, "horror for its own sake, using a titillating mixture of sexual perversion and violence," and wondering at the morals and general disposition of those who could possibly enjoy same. Indeed, "if we were not careful", there might come a day when this unsavoury material would usurp the "real thing"! That's a view that goes back to Victorian times and the dreaded Penny Dreadful. The great thing about our genre is that there's ample room for both the coarse and the cultured - the bookends of a very long shelf.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 11, 2012 8:50:51 GMT
"I also like how it throws up a mystery or two, namely "was Richard Davis 'Philip Buffy Welby'?" and which story did Davis reject outright for Late Night Horror on the grounds that it was set in a German Concentration Camp? You don't think Sir Charles Birkin had the audacity to send him ..... ?" It may have been something by C. S. Forester - I recall Richard condemning a Forester tale that had that setting (which I thought pretty restrained myself). Thanks, Ramsey. In that case, i think Forester's The Head And The Feet has to be our prime suspect? Birkin came to mind as Richard would later adapt So Pale, So Cold, So Fair (as Meeting In Athens) for The Price Of Fear. Speak of the devil, fans of Sir Charles' might like to take a look at the table of contents for Paperback Fanatic # 22 The Female Of The Species certainly lives up to my high expectations (will add notes for The Clump - one of his finest - and The Non-Descript shortly) . I am so pleased to see Shadow Publishing back in business. I think the only thing Mr. Sutton overlooks in his bibliography is Richard's guest appearance in your The Second Staircase.
|
|
|
Post by David A. Riley on May 11, 2012 9:16:12 GMT
|
|