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Post by cauldronbrewer on Apr 27, 2014 16:26:13 GMT
The Author's Tale sounds truly far out. Ghostly flagellation "for the win" as the kids say. I'll not be getting my hands on it unless there is a Wordworth edition or something similar though, as I'm no way forking out the £200+ dealers seem to want for the Ghost Story Press edition on the strength of one story I've not read... "The Author's Tale" is in a Richard Dalby anthology of vampire stories which is relatively easy (and cheap!) to find second-hand. It's a great story, possibly my favourite of the Lewis tales I've read, although I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with vampires... I just read "The Author's Tale" in the aforementioned Dalby anthology, Vampire Stories. It's a winner--creepy, cruel, and sort of funny, with enough bondage to make even Sarban happy. As for the vampire angle, the mostly-invisible spirits in the cellar drink the victim's blood (in addition to doing other things to her). Just received from our friend David A. Sutton; SHADOW PUBLISHING NEWS Welcome to the latest edition. ********** 1. JUST PUBLISHED – TALES OF THE GROTESQUE BY L. A. LEWIS (Edited by Richard Dalby). 2. SHADOW AT THE BIRINGHAM INDEPENDENT BOOK FAIR. **************** Dave Fletcher Based on the strength of "The Author's Tale" and the bizarre "The Tower of Moab," this one's going on the list.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 25, 2023 11:49:54 GMT
Lost Keep: Seventeen-year-old Peter Hunt's inheritance from Aunt Kate comprises a three-inch scale model of a stone fortress, a silver-framed opaque lens, and a cryptic letter in his late father's hand relating to same. The model was reputedly crafted under duress — and cursed — by an Italian craftsman while imprisoned in a dungeon. Inquisitive to a fault, Peter chips away a protective layer from the lens, whereupon he is conveyed to the courtyard of the stone keep. Hunt discovers that, provided he carries the glass, he can travel to and from his new domain at will. Better still, he can lure business rivals, enemies and tiresome girlfriends and leave them to rot. From a Tilbury boarding house to King of the Castle!
Hybrid: As a child, Cyril Chambers was plagued by nightmares, which a clairvoyant later convinced him were flashbacks from a previous incarnation as an adept black magician. Chambers marries and moves to a Victorian mansion in Sussex he instantly recognizes as that where his earlier self practised diabolism — the adjoining field is where he burnt at the stake! Cyril's familiar, a raven-like bird, gradually takes over, until — as his devoted wife explains to Dr. Cole — "His body is mad, but his mind is sane". Chambers degenerates into a hopping, squawking sex maniac, ravishing his wife when she comes looking for him on the green. Dr. Cole eventually has the patient committed to a private institution, but in the meantime Mrs. Chambers gives birth ...
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Post by dem bones on Aug 26, 2023 11:12:29 GMT
The Tower of Moab: "My whole previous life had been no more than a cruel prelude to the ultimate moment - to know myself, in common with the greater portion of condemned Humanity, inevitably given over to the punishment for Original Sin. To be the sport of devils for ever and ever!"
A travelling salesman, down on his luck, takes cheap lodgings in a room overlooking a curious monument — a religious communities attempt at building a tower to Heaven. Three weeks into a whisky binge, he grows aware of terrible organisms descending the structure to torment pedestrians, chasing one unfortunate girl beneath a lorry. Engrossed in the ghastly spectacle, the watcher is not as appalled as he might be until he becomes aware of a pair of these gloating fiends cackling at his side. As with so many Lewis horrors, this story is narrated from a cell in a lunatic asylum, not that 'madness' brings the slightest relief from narrator's terror of what's to come in the hereafter. As Richard Dalby suggests in his introduction, had Tales of the Grotesque been published in America, Lewis would surely have been big with the Weird Tales readership (and I'd love to have let Hugh Rankin loose on the stories, although The Author's Tale is maybe more Margaret Brundage's department).
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Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on Aug 26, 2023 13:35:04 GMT
It seems to me you are in trouble if you ever come across a place named after somewhere in the Bible. When travelling in out of the way places in the USA avoid signposts to biblically named towns.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 27, 2023 11:37:21 GMT
The Child: Two years ago, a multiple baby-killer, pregnant for the fifth time, escaped from the asylum near Wailing Dip, almost certainly to lose her life down a pothole. Mrs Jackson warns a newcomer against visiting her abandoned cottage in the woods, not for fear of the murderesses ghost, but the ghoul that terrified a poacher to death.
The Dirk: The nearest to a conventional supernatural horror to date. Tranter stabs dead his brother to inherit family home, 'The Spinney,' and wealth enough to finance a life of luxury. With co-conspirator Vera providing a watertight alibi, Tranter escapes suspicion. The crime, a seven-day wonder in the press, remains unsolved, the bloodstained murder weapon passing to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. Tranter's one slight concern is that John died swearing vengeance ...
This book truly is a horror anthologist's dream. Makes you wonder why Birkin didn't recycle the stories over the later Creeps collections.
Richard Dalby, who met Lewis's widow, confirms the stories contain autobiographical touches. It's fairly well known that the author suffered mental health problems, and I'm guessing from The Tower of Moab he was (raised a) Roman Catholic?
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Post by dem bones on Aug 30, 2023 18:54:20 GMT
The Chords of Chaos: (Annie Besant [ed.], The Theosophist: A Magazine of Brotherhood, Oriental Philosophy, Art, Literature & Occultism, July 1929). Julian Westenhanger, the talented pianist, is celebrated in occult circles for his 'astral music' — as he plays, he surrenders to hypnotic sleep, allowing the spirits to manipulate his fingers across the keys. One night, Rex Eustace invites a friend, Steer, our narrator, to accompany him to the musical medium's house for a private demonstration. As Westenhanger plays, Steer is transported back through several lifetimes, arriving in Atlantis to witness a temple massacre in honour of "our father Chaos." Steer recognises the High Priest as he slips behind a curtain to improvise a diabolic hymn to carnage. The following, terrible night, Eustace and Steer attend Evensong at St. Mary's. Westenhanger takes his seat at the organ ... The Meerschaum Pipe: " ... far from rustic uneventfulness, I seem to have landed myself in the middle of a Grand Guignol play." As exhumed by Hugh Lamb for The Thrill of Horror. A widower retires to 'Heronay,' a fine country house near Arningham Woods, bought ridiculously cheap on account of its grim reputation. No one else wishes to live there on account of the previous tenant, Harper, a prolific mutilation murderer who died in Broadmoor, although "it's thought that the grounds were cleaned of all his victims." Included in the price, the house, the maniac's library and personal items, including a pipe with amber mouthpiece set in gold ..... Haunted Air: A landslide at the Ridgeway sets loose an elemental to torment pilots entering the airspace directly above to a height of four thousand feet. Although Carr miraculously survives an attack by a lewd, gelatinous gremlin of indiscernible sex bent on wrecking his plane against the rock face, his luck won't last forever. The Iron Swine: Companion piece to Haunted Air, again narrated by Mr. Beckett of the Flying club, concerning a sentient ten-passenger monoplane of murderous disposition. To Beckett's knowledge, the Iron Swine, "one of those foreign, all-metal jobs" has inventively murdered four successive owners without causing the least damage to itself.
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enoch
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 117
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Post by enoch on Aug 31, 2023 2:56:34 GMT
The only one of these I've ever read is "The Meerschaum Pipe," which I like a great deal. So much so, I've re-read it several times over the past few years. If Lewis' other stories are even half as good as that one, I really need to acquire this collection.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 1, 2023 10:02:35 GMT
Animate In Death: Dalby remarks in his introduction that "some of the stories, including The Chord of Chaos, originally appeared in magazines published by the Theosophical Society," and this shocker reads like it was written to order. Raymond Cary's recurring nightmare of a girl rotting alive leads him to believe his new, self-built houseboat is already haunted. Knowing of Enyon's interest in psychic phenomena, he invites him for a fishing weekend on the Broads. Enyon identifies Cary's "ghost" as the young woman who recently went missing, presumed drowned, on a boating trip. It transpires that this stretch of water is a portal to another dimension where the girl is suspended between life and death — and that's far from the worst of her plight. To grant her release, Enyon must somehow find a means to retrieve the corpse from the astral slime. Fail in the attempt, and he will share the same fate. The Author's Tale: (Christine Campbell Thomson, [ed], Terror by Night, 1934: Richard Dalby [ed], Vampire Stories, 1992). And to end, the odd story out, a gloating account of a businessman’s revenge on the ex-wife who ruined him. 'Lester's first thought is to abduct and punish his nemesis with a daily non-consentual flogging beneath an abandoned farmhouse ("He was, I suppose, an ultra-rabid sentimentalist from the general standpoint."). Discovering that the cellar is no longer uninhabited gives him an even better idea. A story better suited to a shudder pulp than Weird Tales (so don't say you weren't warned), as featured on the Vault Advent Calendar for 2011. Read here, if you feel so inclined: The Author's Tale.
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