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Post by franklinmarsh on Oct 20, 2007 10:04:11 GMT
The Sixth Pan Book Of Horror Stories - 1965
The Oldest Story Ever Told - Romain Gary
Man Skin - M S Waddell
Camera Obscura - Basil Copper
Party Games - John Burke
The Unforgiven - Septimus Dale
Puppetmaster - Adobe James
No Flies On Frank - John Lennon
A Heart For A Heart - Ron Holmes
A Real Need - William Sansom
Green Thoughts - John Collier
Give Me Your Cold Hand - John D Keefauver
My Little Man - Abraham Ridley
Crack O' Whips - H A Manhood
The Inmate - Richard Davis
Return To Devil's Tongues - Walter Winward
Putz Dies - Septimus Dale
The Road To Mictlantecutli - Adobe James
The Doll Of Death - Vivian Meik
Love Me, Love Me, Love Me - M S Waddell
The Shed - Richard Stapley
Only read the first story (good but disappointed with the ending) and A Heart For A Heart (very good!) so far - some interesting names in there!
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Post by dem bones on Nov 8, 2007 22:36:10 GMT
John Burke - Party Games: Ronnie Jarman's birthday party and his mum Alice is struggling to control twenty over-excited children. The bright, impeccably well mannered eight year old Simon Potter has turned up uninvited and Alice is wondering if she did the right thing by welcoming him in to enjoy the fun. Simon lost his father some years ago and you'd hope the children would be kind instead of continually bullying him. She wishes her husband would hurry home from work. By the end of the story she bitterly wishes he hasn't. this is Burke at his most unflinching and Party Games would stroll into my fantasy Best Pan Horror selection. John Collier - Green Thoughts: Torquay. Mr. Mannering cultivates a rare orchid, bequeathed him by a friend who died mysteriously on the same expedition. Mannering is delighted with the specimen but has little time to enjoy it as first cousin Jane's cat and then cousin Jane herself go missing. When the huge buds flower into exact replica's of their heads, the startled Mannering steps up too close to examine the phenomena and is himself assimilated into the terror plant. The trio's dilemma is made all the worse by the fact that they remain fully conscious and aware of their awful plight. Enter Mannering's wretched nephew. Wait until he discovers he's been cut out of "the old skinflint's" inheritance! Adobe James - Love Me, Love Me, Love Me: In the moisture on the window pane it had traced with its finger LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE MEA gentle ghost story, Pan Horror style. The narrator is followed by a shadowy thing which over the coming days reveals itself to be the spectre of a beautiful girl. Soon they have become lovers, but her cold touch is playing havoc with his skin .... John Lennon - No Flies On Frank: Frank demonstrates that this is the case, though the same can't be said of his three weeks dead wife. F. Paul Wilson chose this 2 pager as his favourite Pan Horror for Dark Voices and J. A. Cuddon included it in The Penguin Book Of Horror Stories so it's not without admirers. I don't detest it as I once did, it's just .... You know how H. P. Lovecraft used to "revise" his friends' stories until there was plenty of him and very little of them in the final edit? Imagine a Ken Dodd horror story, radically reworked by Spike Milligan. Or am I a bit mad? Like .... William Sanson - A Real Need: Elsewhere in the collection you'll find Green Thoughts and this is more like Red Thoughts. The unbalanced narrator tires of the black, white and green he sees all around him (his dad's a reverend, the cow's monochrome, the fields are, etc.) and obsesses on the red within. He takes a carving knife to his father's skull but, disappointed, slashes his own throat in the mirror. That's better! Ron Holmes - A Heart For A Heart: A wife forces her heart-surgeon husband to sleep with his mistress, Stella, at gunpoint. As he's busy bouncing up and down, she shoots Stella in the head. He overpowers his wife, straps her down on a table and performs a speedy transplant. we leave them as he's about to burn down the house "and consummate my union with Stella and my wife as the flames enjoy our flesh." What screams of a three page filler is actually the shape of things to come for the Pan Horrors. Walter Winward - Return To Devils Tongues: Smallwater, midway between Dorchester and Bridport, the scene of a brutal axe murder fifty years before, a husband butchering his cheating wife before he in turn is killed by her lover. Local legend has it that 'the Devil's Tongues' - three huge slabs of stone - were once used for human sacrifice. Major Lawson is lured to the spot by the spectre of the young woman and has the murder re-enacted before his eyes. He is chased down-hill by the chopper-wielding phantom of her husband. Abraham Ridley - My Little Man: First person account of a disturbed woman's attempts to protect her tiny friend from scheming husband and the asylum staff who wish to part them. Gloriously sick pay off to this one. Basil Copper - Camera Obscura: Mr. Sharstead, ruthless loanshark, calls on Mr. Gingold to collect £300. The genial old man flummoxes him with his cordial demeanour and takes him on a guided tour of his home. Sharstead always suspected the place would be a hovel but it's a treasure trove of Objets D'art - it might make better business sense to accept one of these pieces in lieu of the debt. But he's strangely tongue-tied this afternoon and only regains his usual edge when Gingold quizzes him about his brutal eviction of the Thwaite family. Why doesn't he mind his own business! Now Gingold is showing him his pride and joy - a magnificent, customised camera obscura with a difference. It's a window on the town prior to World War II and is populated by the living dead ...
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Post by paisleycravat on Nov 25, 2007 20:29:59 GMT
I'm reading this one at the mo. A lot of ho-hum stories, in my opinion. Camera Obscura is good, EC-esque fun. Party Games is marvellously morbid. I quite enjoyed No Flies on Frank, but a throwaway joke by a moonlighting pop star is all it is, and it probably shouldn't be here. I loved Green Thoughts, essentially Little Shop of Horrors written by P. G. Wodehouse. The Inmate is good, clean, bestiality-based fun for all the family. Return to Devil's Tongues is like a rather weak E. F. Benson story (but considerably more heterosexual than Benson's stuff generally), but the wonderful dream sequence is probably the best thing I've read in this volume so far. As I think someone else said, Putz Dies could have been a classic if it had been expanded and significantly 'gored up'.
The Oldest Story Ever Told, The Unforgiven, Puppetmaster and Give Me Your Cold Hand are all frightful bores. Man Skin is agreeably chilling, but like many Waddell stories left me feeling unsatisfied. I thought A Heart for a Heart made not the slightest shred of sense and utterly stank. A Real Need was a bit ho-hum for Sansom. I didn't get Crack o' Whips at all, but it featured performing poodles, which is a major point in its favour.
And that's as far as I've got.
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ghannah01
Crab On The Rampage
It's dark in here. Anyone have a match?
Posts: 28
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Post by ghannah01 on Dec 21, 2007 4:56:02 GMT
Hi all, I wrote this review ages and ages ago for another forum but I'm sure you won't mind yet another review of this wonderful anthology. I've rated each story out of 5. Glen
=========================================
"The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories"
Selected by Herbert Van Thal
"The Pan Book of Horror Stories" series was popular enough to span about twenty volumes over the 1960s and '70s. The talents of mainly British writers were showcased and each volume contained around twenty spine-chillers. A snarling rat sitting on a skull adorns the cover of this volume from 1965.
It's a strange amalgam of stories comprising of prose that would have been new and challenging for the time with more conventional stories. It threatens to wallow in mindless gore at one point with consecutive stories racking up the body count. Fortunately, it recovers to present more inventive tales. All up, it's a worthy collection, with the better stories making up for the lesser ones.
"The Oldest Story ever Told" by Romain Gary
A Jewish tailor comes face to face with the S.S. officer who tortured him. Offbeat ending lifts this up a notch. (4/5)
"Man Skin" by M.S. Waddell
Serial Killer Chiller that pre-dates "Silence of the Lambs," a story that played with similar themes. Elevated by a cold, detached writing style. Memorable.(5/5)
"Camera Obscura" by Basil Copper.
When a moneylender attempts to collect a debt from an eccentric with a strange photographic device, his life takes a bizarre twist. Effective step into the "Twilight Zone" and a highlight of the volume. (5/5)
"Party Games" by John Burke.
Horror at a children's party. Short and effective. (4/5)
"The Unforgiven" by Septimus Dale.
A Girl is tormented by her father. Solid but rather nasty psychological horror. Not for everyone. (4/5)
"Puppet Master" by Adobe James.
A puppet master tries to destroy his own puppets but they have other ideas. Okay but treads familiar territory. (3/5)
"No Flies on Frank" by John Lennon.
Black humour from Beatle John Lennon. A piece that originally appeared in a volume of his own nonsense verse. Out of context it works quite well, providing some releif after the knife wielding carnage of the previous three stories. (4/5)
"A heart for a heart" by Ron Holmes.
A surgeon has diabolical plans for his wife. Gore and Madness. A bit overdone. (2/5)
"A Black Need" by William Sansome.
First person tale of madness and murder like the one that preceded it. (2/5)
"Green Thoughts" by John Collier.
Bizarre horror with victims becoming part of a plant. Oddly entertaining and certainly original. (3/5)
"Give me your Cold Hand" by John D. Keefauver.
Passion, treachery and murder. Solid "blood crime" tale, well told. (4/5)
"My Little Man" by Abraham Ridley.
Another first person tale from someone who's mad. Bit of a trend here. Quite effective this one. (4/5)
"Crack o' Whips" by H. A. Manhood.
A nasty dog trainer who uses a whip to get his animals to perform, gets a taste of his own medicine. No surprises. (2/5)
"The Inmate" by Richard Davis.
A Woman becomes fascinated by a gorilla that her husband has in captivity. A matter of taste. (3/5)
"Return to Devil's Tongue" by Walter Winward.
A man's house guest is drawn to a scene of an old murder. Solid but unremarkable ghost story. (3/5)
"Putz Dies" by Septimus Dale.
A sadistic war criminal, paralysed from the neck down, faces the electric chair or perhaps a worse fate. Original and effective. (4/5)
"The Road to Mictlantecutci" by Adobe James
An escaped criminal encounters a sombre priest and then a beautiful woman on a dark desert road. Familiar but solid supernatural tale. (3/5)
"The Doll of Death" by Vivien Meik.
A Doctor is Central Africa discovers that black magic is behind the mystery of a strange love triangle. Awkwardly written story. One of the weaker entries in the collection. (2/5)
"Love Me, Love Me, Love Me" by M.S. Waddell.
Superb little chiller about a female spectre that follows a man home. Simple but effective. (4/5)
"The Shed" by Richard Stapley.
A hospital patient recalls a train trip that took him to a mysterious shed where he was tortured and blinded. Intriguing first person set up is let down by an unsatisfactory second half that explains the mystery. (3/5)
Some of these stories, like "Camera Obscura" have appeared it subsequent anthologies. Sadly, like so many short story collections, there is nothing in this volume about the authors or why their stories were chosen.
Overall rating for this collection 4/5 (just)
Glen Hannah.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Dec 21, 2007 13:10:23 GMT
Just me on A Heart For A Heart then?
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Post by Johnlprobert on Dec 21, 2007 14:51:43 GMT
Love Me Love Me Love Me is one of my favourites of the entire Pan run. Martin Waddell writes children's books now, doesn't he? Probably explains the absence of a collection of his more adult stuff
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Post by dem bones on Dec 21, 2007 20:28:21 GMT
I'm not sure if Ramsey Campbell has this right, but in Dark Voices he writes:
" ... and new tales by some real discoveries (for instance, the outrageous humours and horrors of M. S. Waddell, an inimitable talent destroyed by an IRA bomb)."
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Post by Dr Terror on Dec 22, 2007 11:16:49 GMT
I also see a story of his called Whisper was made into an episode of Night Gallery.
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Post by allthingshorror on Aug 10, 2009 15:59:34 GMT
My Little Man by Abraham Ridley was actually written by Martin (M S) Waddell. So all together he is now to blame for Septimus Dale Hugh Reid Abraham Ridley.  |
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Post by dem bones on Aug 10, 2009 18:42:50 GMT
Septimus Dale and Abraham Ridley make sense now you've told us, but i'd never have suspected Waddell wrote Dulcie in a million years.
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Post by allthingshorror on Sept 27, 2009 22:00:25 GMT
Found this:  |
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Post by dem bones on Sept 28, 2009 15:01:54 GMT
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Post by Dr Terror on Jun 21, 2011 15:36:32 GMT
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Post by noose on Jun 21, 2011 17:36:53 GMT
How in fuck's name did you find THAT? It trumps everything I've ever uncovered! Genius and thanks for sharing Charlie!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jun 21, 2011 19:58:44 GMT
That really is marvellous! I take my hat off to you Charlie!
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