Stephen Jones - Summer Chills

[alansjf]

To complement demonik's Mammoth Book of Monsters post (and, I suppose Rick Ferreira's A Chill to the Sunlight), here's another excellent Stephen Jones anthology from last year:

Summer Chills (Carol & Graf, 2007)



(cover: Les Edwards)

Stephen Jones - Introduction: Holidays in Hell
Ramsey Campbell - Seeing the World
Christopher Fowler - The Threads
Nancy Holder - Little Dedo
Dennis Etchison - The Dark Country
Roberta Lannes - The Anguish of Departure
Basil Copper - The Cave
Scott Edelman - Survival of the Fittest
Elizabeth Massie - Landlock
Kim Newman - Richard Riddle, Boy Detective, in "The Case of the French Spy"
Karl Edward Wagner - In the Pines
Mark Samuels - A Gentleman from Mexico
Joel Lane - The City of Love
D. Lynn Smith - TheCharnel House
Glen Hirshberg - Millwell
Sarah Pinborough - The Bohemian of the Arbat
Robert Silverberg - Not Our Brother
Brian Lumley - The Sun, the Sea and the Silent Scream
Michael Marshall Smith - Being Right
Clive Barker - In the Hills, the Cities
Harlan Ellison - Incognita, Inc.

I do like the Les Edwards cover art - wonderfully ghoulish!

[dem bones]

not that it matters what i say, but i was pretty negative about Kim Newman's overall contribution to Zombie Apocalypse so here's one of his that cheered me right up from my current book in the background.

Kim Newman - Richard Riddle, Boy Detective, in The Case of the French Spy: Lyme Regis in the very early 1900's. Dick, Violet - relax, she's "not like a proper girl" - and her brother Ernest comprise the Richard Riddle Detective Agency. The trio make it their business to poke their noses into everyone else's, solving mysteries which invariably involve smugglers and french spies. The latest local to come under their suspicion is the self-styled Reverend Daniel Sellwood of Orris Priory. Sellwood leads his own anti-Darwinist sect, the Church Militant, and incurs the children's wrath when his burly stooges, Brothers Fose and Fessel, beat on one of Violet's prize 'dinosaur fossils' with a sledgehammer. The Boy Detective and his colleagues locate a secret passage leading beneath the Priory where sure enough, Sellwood has a french Spy chained up in a dungeon. Except this french spy is a fanged fish-man straight out of H. P. Lovecraft.

Having established that the scaly being isn't very french after all, the children help it to escape and go on the rampage which it does very well, tearing the heads off the fossil-smashing brethren and dragging the raving Reverend out to sea (serves him right: he dresses stupid and self-publishes). Unfortunately, the irritating little shits emerge unscathed, presumably to inflict further misery on decent law-abiding criminal lunatics.

[dem bones]

Michael Marshall Smith - Being Right:"He loved his wife and wouldn't want her any different. But just once in a while he wished that there were some way of proving he was right.
No one was more surprised than him to find there actually was.

More feel-good fable than horror story, though it has it's spooky moment. Dan and wife are holidaying in London. Dan, being a book-lover, heads for Charing Cross Road. Since last he was in the capital, most of the second-hand shops have vanished but on one of the side streets he finds Pandora's Books and gets down to some serious rummaging. His big find is a mysterious something entitled Hopes Of A Lesser Demon: Part II, a series of seemingly random articles thrown together as though it were somebody's personal problem solver. Most fascinating of all, a list of invocations, one of which summons "the Listening Angel" who will confirm whether or not you are right in any disagreement. Feeling foolish, Dan climbs to his hotel roof and summons the Angel who duly appears, but whose answers are not quite what Dan hoped to hear. MMS's It's A Wonderful Life?

Sarah Pinborough - The Bohemian Of The Arbat: Anna believes that beauty ultimately triumphs over all and she's in a good position to judge. A former exotic dancer in a Soho basement club, she used her body to snare powerful businessman Robert Jackson and he's been putty in her hand ever since. But Anna is bored and wonders if marrying Bob for his money was worth the effort of having to pretend she enjoys sex with him. On a working holiday (at least, for him) in Moscow, she meets the charming, handsome and clearly well heeled Gregori Ivanovitch at the Kremlin museum. Gregori is a supremely talented doll-maker and requests that she pose for him at his shop in the lively Bohemian quarter. Flattered and not a little taken with Gregori, she slips out of her hotel after dark. A hunched, cowled woman follows her all the way, but is she a particularly tenacious beggar or merely a good samaritan trying to deliver a warning?

i had a great time with Sarah Pinborough's Diary Entries in Zombie Apocalypse and this is brilliant - and properly horrible - as well. Particularly liked Gregori's explanation for the lack of invalids, immigrants and non-conformists in Red Square. "Where do you think all the people who refuse to be equal live? Those that don't want to be, or can't be worker ants of the state? ... They're under our feet, pretty Anya. The gypsies, the hermits, the political refugees, and the eccentric artists who seem to like to be free, all tucked away in the old tunnels and boiler rooms and bomb shelters, living in tribes."

[Shrink Proof]

A great collection, this one. I actually did read most of it while away on holiday, though that was in the Yorkshire Dales in the pissing rain rather than in the sort of locales featured here, such as a sun-soaked Aegean island or a fly-blown Mexican village. Anyway, I couldn't fault it and there were some nicely unpleasant tales - those by Christopher Fowler and Brian Lumley score particularly highly in this regard. Even the ones that are not at all horrific are extremely readable - Michael Marshall Smith and Harlan Ellison are your men here.

I bought it a year ago and it'd been sitting on the shelf pretty much forgotten until Dem nudged me into reading it with his comments here. So thanks Dem, you did me a favour.

[dem bones]

Jun 4, 2013 9:34:32 GMT Shrink Proof said:

A great collection, this one. I actually did read most of it while away on holiday, though that was in the Yorkshire Dales in the pissing rain rather than in the sort of locales featured here, such as a sun-soaked Aegean island or a fly-blown Mexican village. Anyway, I couldn't fault it and there were some nicely unpleasant tales - those by Christopher Fowler and Brian Lumley score particularly highly in this regard. Even the ones that are not at all horrific are extremely readable - Michael Marshall Smith and Harlan Ellison are your men here.

I bought it a year ago and it'd been sitting on the shelf pretty much forgotten until Dem nudged me into reading it with his comments here. So thanks Dem, you did me a favour.

Glad you got a hit from it, Mr. Proof. Unusually for me, actually read this one through cover to cover, but was laid up in bed at time, hence lack of usual rubbish commentary. Some stories are familiar from other collections, but many of the originals are a complete blur, so clearly time from a revisit. If I remember, Paul Finch's next scheduled Terror Tales ... is the similarly themed Terror Tales From The Seaside, so that should be available when next you fancy a waterlogged week away in Yorkshire. Hope you enjoyed your break!