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Post by dem bones on Jan 10, 2010 11:52:03 GMT
Hugh Lamb (ed.) - A Tide Of Terror; An Anthology Of Rare Horror Stories (W.H. Allen, 1972: Taplinger, 1973)  Photo: Bob Marchant
Introduction - Peter Haining
H. R. Wakefield - The Red Lodge
W. C. Morrow - His Unconquerable Enemy
Joseph Payne Brennan - On The Elevator
A. C. Benson - The Closed Window
E. F. Benson - The Step
R. H. Benson - Father Brent’s Tale
Charles Birkin - Some New Pleasures Prove
Margery Lawrence - The Dogs Of Pemba
Algernon Blackwood - Full Circle
A. N. L. Munby - The Tregannet Book Of Hours
Sax Rohmer - The Master Of Hollow Grange
C. D. Heriot - The Trapdoor
Bertram Mitford - The Sign Of The Spider
Ambrose Bierce - Some Haunted Houses
T. O. Beachcroft - The Eyes
Thomas Burke - Johnson Looked Back
Eleanor Scott - The Twelve Apostles
Hugh Walpole - Mrs LuntBlurb The one thing shared by the eighteen stories in A Tide of Terror —apart from their ability to send a delicious shiver up your spine—is their rarity. Hardly any have been anthologised before and most of the stories have been unobtainable for many years. They include representatives of all types of macabre fiction, including ghosts, walking corpses, human and inhuman monsters, witches and curses.
It is probably the first anthology to include a ghost story from each of the three Benson brothers. E. F. Benson is well known to ghost-story enthusiasts but his brothers Arthur and Hugh are not so familiar. There are also little-known masterpieces from such famous names in the genre as Algernon Blackwood, Sax Rohmer and H. R. Wakefield. A Tide of Terror contains some of the best horror stories ever written, and some of the least known.Hugh's first (discounting his much sought after The Story Of Water for the Water board)! Includes: Charles Birkin - ‘Some New Pleasures Prove’: Devon. Laura Campbell’s car breaks down shortly after being stopped at a police roadblock where she was warned that sadistic killer Arthur ‘The Midnight Murderer’ Smith is on the loose having escaped from the Waymore asylum. When she chances upon Jasmine Cottage, Laura thinks her troubles are over - until, watching the ten o’clock news, she realises that her genial host fits the description of the man the police are looking for. W. C. Morrow - His Unconquerable Enemy: Calcutta. Neranya is a loyal servant of the Rajah but prone to cruelty and outbursts of temper. When he fatally stabs a dwarf, the Rajah orders that his right arm be severed as punishment. Neranya despises him thereafter and plots to destroy him. First he butchers his only son, for which crime his legs are sliced off (he’s already lost the second arm for an earlier misdemeanor). The quadruamputee is shoved in a cage ten feet off the floor in the Grand Hall where the Rajah can pop in for a quick gloat whenever he likes. That should keep the armless, legless one out of mischief! Shouldn’t it ….? H. R. Wakefield - The Red Lodge: The narrator, his wife Mary and son Tim move into the old Queen Anne house of the title, rented from an unscrupulous estate agent, Wilkes, who turns a blind eye to the numerous tragic deaths associated with the property. Before long the new residents are subjected to all manner of supernatural manifestations, beginning with the slime trodden into the carpets of many of the rooms by persons unseen and the recurrent apparition of a ‘green monkey’ sprinting toward the pond. Legend has it that, back in the early eighteenth century, the then owner bribed his servants to terrify his wife to death. They succeeded all too well, and one night she ran from the house and drowned herself. Her husband wasted no time in installing a harem at the lodge, but one by one his lovers followed her example. And so it has continued to the present day. E. F. Benson - The Step: Alexandra, Egypt. John Cresswell, ruthless real estate speculator, evicts a family from their home. The strain proves too much for the father. Cursed for his callous behaviour by the man’s widow, Cresswell is pursued everywhere by - at first - invisible footsteps. Finally, the abomination shows itself. Thomas Burke - Johnson Looked Back: Johnson is pursued through the London fog by an eyeless, handless thing of “maimed ugliness.” In his final moments, he recognises his pursuer as … A. N. L. Munby - The Tregganet Book Of Hours: St. Denoil, Cornwall. How an illustration in a Calendar of Saints came to be defaced and replaced. It all goes back to the 15th century when Lord of the Manor and pirate Hector Tregganet cheated Thomas Prest (!) out of his land by circulating stories among the superstitious peasants that he practiced witchcraft. They duly torched Prest's house with he and his wife trapped inside. Before he died, Prest pronounced a curse on Tregganet that he "would never be buried with his forefathers in the church of St. Fagan." On his death in 1510, Tregganet's coffin was indeed taken into the church, but .... Joseph Payne Brennan - On The Elevator: A rotting ship is dislodged from the sea bed during a storm and pieces of wreckage wash ashore. Presently a figure in a rotting black raincoat slopes through the lobby of the Atlas Hotel on Ocean Street and into the elevator before the night-porter can get a good look at him. A piercing scream from the woman in 311 heralds a night of terror. Great little horror story this, notable for an extreme death by long fingernails!
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Post by allthingshorror on Feb 7, 2010 8:25:51 GMT
Taplinger (1973)
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Post by dem bones on Oct 4, 2023 12:51:14 GMT
 Hookway Cowles, The Dogs of Pemba. : ( Tatler, 25 March 1927). Doom of Hugh Kinnersley, the brutal, drunk of a British Commissioner on a small African island. Since his recent arrival at the Custom House, Kinnersley has fast earned the hatred of the community, not least for his callous behaviour toward the tribal chief's daughter whom he took as a stop-gap until his fiancé, Joan, arrived from England. When our narrator, his new assistant, lands ashore, Kinnersley's 'boy' drops his suitcase, earning a thrashing to near death. Their patience exhausted, the Pembans perform a black magic ritual to have the Commissioner join a slobbering pack of hounds whose terrifying cry is pitched somewhere between those of a jackal and a man suffering unendurable torment. Hugh Walpole - Mrs. Lunt: (Cynthia Asquith [ed.] The Ghost Book, 1926). Runciman recalls the Christmas he spent as a guest of fellow author, Robert Lunt, at his home on the Cornish coast. Exactly a year has passed since Mrs. Lunt, a woman of "beastly malice," died from heart failure, and the host is a bag of nerves, pathetically eager to please and prone to fits of rage at his guest's obvious unease. When Runciman enquires after a pale old woman he takes for the housekeeper, Lunt falls completely to pieces, raving that there are no women in the house. We who read far more of this stuff than is healthy know better. T. O. Beechcroft - The Eyes: ( A Young Man In A Hurry, 1934). Dr. Sylvester, stressed, overworked and dog-tired, feels an overwhelming compulsion to spend the night at the bedside of a little girl dying of meningitis. Oh, to experience the thrill of watching the life flicker from her bloodshot eyes! A concerned colleague warns the condition is contagious, that he's risking the lives of his wife and child as well as his own. Sylvester dismisses these objections. |
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stricik
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 12
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Post by stricik on Oct 4, 2023 14:50:25 GMT
I wonder what the character in the picture is doing: trying to peel off his shadow from the floor?
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Post by dem bones on Oct 6, 2023 16:15:41 GMT
" .... monstrosities that may not be described, whose names may not be written .."
Sax Rohmer - The Master of Hollow Grange: (The New Magazine, June 1918: The Haunting of Low Fennel, 1920). On returning wounded from France, Jack Dillon convalesces at the gloomy woodland mansion of Dr. Kassimere, an old friend of his father. Jack takes instant dislike to his host, there's something "ghoul in human form" about him, though there's no chance of his leaving once he's set eyes on the man's strikingly attractive adopted daughter, Phryné Devant, with whom, like so many before him, he falls madly in love. It's soon painfully obvious that Dillon senior is a terrible judge of character. The word in the Threshers Inn is that Kassimere - mad scientist, Black Magician, alchemist & Co - uses Phryné as unwitting Siren, luring lovestruck young men to a grisly doom in his laboratory of horrors.
Algernon Blackwood - Full Circle: (The English Review, May 1925). From the age of thirty, Jorden, a stockbroker, is haunted by the ghost of an energetic, mischievous young boy he once knew but can't quite place. Who is this beautiful free spirit? It finally comes to him at the moment of Death. Blackwood seems to have been a man at peace with himself, in as much as any of us can be.
Bertram Mitford - The Sign of the Spider: An extract from the novel of the same name, published 1896. South Africa. Captured by Ba-gcatya tribesmen, Laurence Stanninghame, diamond hunter, is cast into a skeleton-festooned "hell-pit" as sacrifice to the local demon God — a huge arachnid-grizzly hybrid with hairy human face! Franticly improvising a weapon from available materials, Stanninghame takes the fight to the multi-tentacled horror. Fearless Englishman he may be, but this is no time for the Queensbury rules. "[He] drove his bone-dagger into the body — drove it into the very butt."
Rohmer's Gothic melodrama is a Hammer film in waiting. I'm guessing Kassimere's "magnus opus" is creating a homunculus? Blackwood's buoyant story is insanely incongruous in this company.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 8, 2023 10:15:01 GMT
"This apartment was suffused with a faint greenish light, the source of which I could not determine, making everything distinctly visible, though nothing was sharply defined. Everything, I say, but in truth the only objects within the blank stone walls of that room were human corpses. In number they were perhaps eight or ten - it may well be understood that I did not truly count them. They were of different ages, or rather sizes, from infancy up, and of both sexes. All were prostrate on the floor, excepting one, apparently a young woman, who sat up, her back supported by an angle of the wall. A babe was clasped in the arms of another and older woman. A half-grown lad lay face downward across the legs of a full-bearded man. One or two were nearly naked, and the hand of a young girl held the fragment of a gown which she had torn open at the breast. The bodies were in various stages of decay, all greatly shrunken in face and figure. Some were but little more than skeletons...."Ambrose Bierce - Some Haunted Houses: The Isle of Pines. ( San Francisco Examiner, 26 Aug. 1888). Rev. Henry Galbraith, the lawyer Maven and his son investigate spectacular disturbances at the house of the late Herman Deluse, recluse, alleged former pirate, who ever settled financial transactions with Spanish gold. A Fruitless Assignment. ( Current Literature, July 1889: Peter Haining [ed.], Poltergeist,1987). Nothing to see here, just the usual phantom hooligans kicking a woman's head around the house. A Vine on a House. ( Cosmopolitan, October 1905: Daisy Butcher [ed.], Evil Roots, 2019). The wildly swaying vegetation above the abandoned Harding house alerts Reverend Gruber to the true whereabouts of "visiting her mother in Ohio" Mrs. Harding, At Old Man Eckerts. ( San Francisco Examiner, 17. Nov 1901). A schoolteacher investigating the inexplicable disappearance of a local recluse from a Vermont address inexplicably vanishes before witnesses on the same premises. The Spook House. ( San Francisco Examiner, 7 July 1889). Personal pick of these shorts. Colonel McArdle is suspected of murdering Judge Veigh, who has not been seen since their inspection of an abandoned, locally infamous Kentucky plantation house. The Other Lodgers. ( Cosmopolitan, August 1907). The narrator boards overnight at the Breathitt House Hotel, Atlanta. A moribund clerk shows him to the room which served as makeshift morgue during the Civil War. The Thing at Nolan. ( San Francisco Examiner, 2 Aug. 1891, as A Queer Story). John May is acquitted of his father's murder after three witnesses swear to have seen the 'dead' man walk bleeding through the town store five miles away. But children chance upon the corpse while playing in the woods. Eleanor Scott - The Twelve Apostles: ( Randall's Round, 1929). Matthews, an American, agrees to buy Barton's Cross Manor on condition it comes complete with "a real good ghost." The vicar, Mr. Molyneux confirms this is indeed the case, and he would do well to keep locked the panelled room, as this is where Sir Jerome Lindall, Catholic priest, alchemist and reputed demonologist, performed the worst of his experiments. The resident ghost is either that of Lindall or someone or something infinitely worse. Matthews discards the advice. Ms. 'Scott' does M. R. James.
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