Christine Campbell Thomson - Still Not at Night

[Calenture]

Still Not at Night (Arrow, 1963)

Reprinted from Not at Night (Selwyn & Blount, Ltd., 1925), with a new introduction by Christine Campbell Thomson.

King Cobra by Joseph O Kesselring
The Girdle by Joseph McCord
Behind the Blinds by 'Flavia Richardon' (Christine Campbell Thomson)
The Death Plant by Michael Gwynn
The Tortoiseshell Cat by Grey La Spina
The Tapping by J Dyott Matthews
St Urag of the Tail by Oscar Cook
The Metronome by August Derleth
Offspring of Hell by H Thomson
The Ghost that Never Died by Elizabeth Sheldon
Passing of a God by Henry S Whitehead
The Wonderful Tune by J D Kerruish
Four Doomed Men by Geoffrey Vace

One of my two favourite covers. The other is for 'Charles LLoyd's' (Birkin's) Creeps.

King Cobra by Joseph O Kesselring: Travelling South of the Malaya Peninsula to investigate a fall in production, Peter Garr steps ashore at Surabaya to be met by his manager Wharton – or the man he believes to be Wharton:

“This thing, this creature crouching there on the tiny wharf that jutted out onto the reeking Salo River, it could not be Wharton! It could not be human! My flesh crept... it was like a spider – a monstrous fat spider – dressed in the clothes of a man! The ghastly Malay moon shone full down upon him – or it!”

Wharton is round at the middle, with skinny pipe-cleaner arms and legs. “From the shoulders the fleshless arms hung tensely, ending, one of them, a bony, curling hand; the other – I found it hard to believe my eyes – the other ended in a blade! Minus his left hand, the creature wore a broad knife-blade affixed in some manner to his stump.”

Garr becomes immediately suspicious of Wharton when he confuses his missing assistant’s name Johnson with Jackson. Moments later, following the grotesque individual to his home, Garr narrowly escapes death when the huge black servant, George, throws a kris at his head.

Then there are Wharton’s ‘children’. They are snakes, huge, deadly poisonous cobras. It was a ‘kiss’ from a king cobra that had caused the loss of Wharton’s hand. Later, after more attempts on his life, Garr finds himself imprisoned in a hut with board walls two-inches thick. A voice from the other side of the wall reveals that there is another prisoner in the hut. A prisoner who claims to be the real Wharton.

The man who has taken his place is the murderer Spider Horrossek.

Now Garr hears a rustling as scaly bodies crawl across the darkened hut towards him.

The madman Horroseck has unleashed his hideous children!

[sean]

Looks like Gollum on the cover!

[carolinec]

Is that Joseph Kesselring, writer of the play "Arsenic And Old Lace", or am I getting my writers mixed up?

[Calenture]

Jun 5, 2008 16:38:48 GMT @sean said:

Looks like Gollum on the cover!

I suppose it looks at least as much like Gollum as kylie Mynogue with red hair looks like Carol Vorderman, as I suggested on the Pop Princesses thread, Sean.

Incidentally, this was the cover that I saw in that Plymouth shop window along with the mens magazines, which I used on the No Way to Treat a Lady thread.

Definitely one of those moments which determines the course of a life.

I think the Still Not at Night cover might be by Josh Kirby, but I'm guessing. No one else seems good enough!

Jun 5, 2008 16:50:56 GMT carolinec said:

Is that Joseph Kesselring, writer of the play "Arsenic And Old Lace", or am I getting my writers mixed up?

Thanks for this, Caroline. I'd completely missed the connection. I'm sure it must be the same writer.

Incidentally, none of the stories in Still Not at Night is given a publishing history. I think Dem wrote that almost exactly half of them were previously published in Weird Tales.

Sometime it might be interesting to figure out how many of the stories in the Pan, Fontana anthologies (etc.) were previously published elsewhere, and where.

But preferably not on this thread.

[Calenture]

The Girdle by Joseph McCord: Carson pays a visit to the father of his late friend to tell him how Pelham had died. Sir John is impatient of the visit; all the Pelhams have died well. It’s in the breed. But he grows interested when Carson tells him of the woodcutter’s hut in Holland where Pelham had found the leather belt. In the hut, Pelham had gone into the attic alone and found the belt in an old chest. Like a “Dutch Sam Browne,” it was. “Thought the cursed thing was a snake – felt cold.”

But something about Pelham is different when he descends from the attic. “You’ve seen a dog that is vicious and a coward – all at the same time. He wants to go for your throat, and something holds him for the moment.”

Some nights later Pelham disappears, but he’s found again surrounded by dead German infantrymen. “And they weren’t shot and they weren’t gassed – every one had his throat torn! Torn!”

Fortunately, Sir John knows something about werewolves...

Behind the Blinds by ‘Flavia Richardson’ (Christine Campbell Thomson): Every evening Joan Morgan sits at the window of her bed-sitting room and looks at the windows opposite at the back of Elvaston Road. The new second floor tenants in the house directly opposite had just moved in, and it was always interesting to see new people and their things. She is quite unprepared for the face that appears at one of those windows, “...a face so redolent with evil, so utterly wicked with the refinements of knowledge, that it made her sick and even terrified to look at it. It was a woman – a woman who had once been handsome, perhaps beautiful, yet now every feature was a bestial travesty of what it had been in its prime. The hair was plentifully streaked with grey, the neck was wrinkled and sagging, but the eyes were alive with ferocity and hate.”

From this moment on, Joan lives in a state of fear and horror of the inhabitants of the second floor-back of thirty-two Elvaston Road. When her boss asks her to deliver a valuable vase to an address in that road, she is horrified when she realises that it will mean entering that house and passing close by the dreaded apartment door.

Inevitably, she finds herself invited into the room and subsequently imprisoned in a cell where the only other occupant is another girl chained to the wall – a girl naked and stick-thin and terribly weak.

“I’ve been here weeks, I think. I don’t know... He says I’m too fat...”

[cauldronbrewer]

Jun 6, 2008 14:15:19 GMT Calenture said:

Jun 5, 2008 16:38:48 GMT @sean said:

Looks like Gollum on the cover!

I suppose it looks at least as much like Gollum as kylie Mynogue with red hair looks like Carol Vorderman, as I suggested on the Pop Princesses thread, Sean.)

I just received a copy of the 1972 Arrow reprint of Still Not At Night--the one retitled Only by Daylight--and every time I look at the cover I can't think of anyone but Michael Jackson.

[mattofthespurs]

I've got that cover and you're right. The resemblance is uncanny