Mike Ashley - Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels

[benedictjjones]

just got this. mainly bought it for TED Kleins 'Nadelmans God' but no doubt i'll read the others in it.

[jonathan122]

The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels - Ed. Mike Ashley (Carroll & Graf 1988)

Introduction
The Monkey - Stephen King
The Parasite - Arthur Conan Doyle
There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding - Russell Kirk
The Damned - Algernon Blackwood
Fengriffen - David Case
The Uttermost Farthing - A. C. Benson
The Rope in the Rafters - Oliver Onions
Nadelman's God - T. E. D. Klein
The Feasting Dead - John Metcalfe
How the Wind Spoke at Madaket - Lucius Shepard


Ashley's definition of what a "short novel" seems slightly loose ("Long, Long Trail..." is only 29 pages long) but this is a nice and eclectic selection containing a lot of stuff which is still hard to find to this day, and would probably have been even more so in 1988.

There's a Long, Long Trail... - A bit too sentimental for me I'm afraid, but a lot of people swear by this as Kirk's masterpiece, so who am I to judge?

The Uttermost Farthing - Now cheaply available in the Wordsworth collection of A. C. and R. H. Benson's stories, where it receives a lot of praise in the introduction. Personally I found it to be a fairly unmemorable ghost story.

The Feasting Dead - I'd only read Metcalfe's early work prior to reading this, and I was surprised at how accessible it was in comparison. (Perhaps Metcalfe was consciously directing his efforts at the Arkham House anthology market by this point.) Anyway, it's a creepy tale of vampirism and child abuse, although the details of the plot fall apart pretty quickly if examined in any detail.

Nadelman's God - One of four excellent "novellas" (again, "medium-length short story" is more accurate, but doesn't sound like such good value for money) published by Klein under the title Dark Gods in the eighties, after which he appears to have virtually abandoned horror fiction (and, indeed, fiction of any sort), a sad loss. Everyone has their own favourite from Dark Gods, but this may well be mine. A heavy metal band bases the lyrics of one of their songs on a poem that Nadelman wrote whilst at college, and one of their fans starts to take it a bit too literally...

[jonathan122]

The Rope in the Rafters - Hopefully the forthcoming Wordsworth edition of Onions's ghost stories will put paid to the idea that the only good thing he did was "The Beckoning Fair One". Granted, he definitely wrote a few clunkers, but there are some fine, overlooked pieces as well, not least this story about James Hopley, a shell-shocked and facially disfigured First World War veteran recuperating from a recent relapse in an ex-girlfriend's chateau, and slowly starts to develop an affinity with the resident ghost. The grim ending can be seen a long way off (pretty much from the title, actually), but the build-up is compelling. Of particular note is the scene where Hopley spies on a village fete gathering alms for the "picturesquely wounded". A fine and sad ghost story.

[benedictjjones]

not sure nadelmans god would be my favourite out of the four i reckon it woul be out of blackman with a horn and children of the kingdom

[cw67q]

This is a good collection with some stand out tales by Metcalfe, Onions, Kirk and Klein (I would go for BMWAH followed by Petey as my favs from the excellent Dark Gods, since people are casting votes).

The Doyle story is also pleasingly creepy and I enjoyed AC Benson's story at the time but now recall nothing about it.

I don't remember being enthused about the Shepard or Case stories though and I'm suspect the so-so King entry might have been included as a sure fire way to boost tales.

But why, oh why, did Mike Ashley choose the interminable "the Damned" by Algernon Blackwood? Blackwood has many greatv tales at novella length but this piece is hardly going to pull back a new reader of Blackwood for more.

- Chris

[benedictjjones]

i liked what he did with petey but reckon i'll have to go with children of the kingdom.

vaultofevil.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=usofa&action=display&thread=3509&page=1

[dem bones]

Mar 15, 2009 1:14:03 GMT jonathan122 said:

The Rope in the Rafters - Hopefully the forthcoming Wordsworth edition of Onions's ghost stories will put paid to the idea that the only good thing he did was "The Beckoning Fair One". Granted, he definitely wrote a few clunkers, but there are some fine, overlooked pieces as well, not least this story about James Hopley, a shell-shocked and facially disfigured First World War veteran recuperating from a recent relapse in an ex-girlfriend's chateau, and slowly starts to develop an affinity with the resident ghost. The grim ending can be seen a long way off (pretty much from the title, actually), but the build-up is compelling. Of particular note is the scene where Hopley spies on a village fete gathering alms for the "picturesquely wounded". A fine and sad ghost story.

Thought the The Cigarette Case and The Rocker were pleasant enough, but of those read only The Rope in the Rafters made anything like the impression of The Beckoning Fair One, one of very few stories I'm loathe to re-read for fear it won't have the same effect second time around. The Wordsworth edition, Dead Of Night: The Ghost Stories Of Oliver Onions is due in August.

Chris, I'm so in agreement with you on the coma-inducing Blackwood selection and The Uttermost Farthing ("enjoyed AC Benson's story at the time but now recall nothing about it." - likewise: same goes for the Shepard offering) that it's a relief to find you weren't over-keen on Fengriffen which I absolutely adore. It's a slow burner - in fact, think I was getting bored with it early on - but once he starts cranking the tension .... it's still my favourite modern Gothic novel - am even fond of the Amicus film!

Ben, Children Of The Kingdom for me, if only because it was the first of his I read (in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces anthology) and can still remember it.

[cw67q]

Maybe I should give Fengriffin another look, although I'd need to find my copy first (some box in the loft probably) and I've got so much reading to catch up on already...

I really like Oliver Onions, but the Cigarette Case was a weak choice for the Oxford Book of Ghost Stories. Problem is that most of Onion's tales are too long for anthologies.

My favourite is A Painted Face which is really a short novel. It deals with a young girl on the cusp of womanhood on a mediteranean cruse and the influence of long-dead (?) gods. I'm a sucker for tales that stray into this machenesque territory, but this is a beautifully written tale.

Rooum is another good one which has proven short enough to be anthologised (maybe in the Oxford book of 20th century ghosts?). But I like most of his work even those that I'd concede become a little wordy.

- Chris

[monker]

I'd go for Benlian if someone wanted to fit Oliver Onions into an anthology but were afraid of TBFO's length.

I think astronomically high expectations may have spoilt my reading of the latter story. I was kind of hoping for deeper psychological reasoning anticipating the spook but instead all I merely got was a kind of obstinate or stubborn character in Oleron that did not really ring true for me. The pacing and atmosphere were marvellous but I failed to really care or connect enough with the character.

I love it when spooks are left unexplained but they still have to be 'apt' somehow if you get where I'm coming from.

[benedictjjones]

Ben, Children Of The Kingdom for me, if only because it was the first of his i read (in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces anthology) and i still remember it.

-snap!

[dem bones]

Mike Ashley (ed.) - The Mammoth Book Of Short Horror Novels (Robinson, 1992)

Luis Rey

Blurb:
10 of the world's great short novels of terror and the supernatural in one giant-value volume!

Never come across Benliani or A Painted Face so I'm hoping Wordsworth work their magic and cram them both into Dead Of Night. If they can shove Varney The Vampyre into a single paperback, it shouldn't be beyond them!

I was really lucky with The Beckoning Fair One in that one of the first books I read was The Best Ghost Stories (Hamlyn of all publishers!). As I'd never heard of most of the authors virtually everything in there was a mystery to me, so had zero expectations for The Beckoning Fair One or, say, Hitchens' How Love Came to Professor Guildea - it was the first place I read The Great God Pan, too. You know an anthology has done a good job when it makes the reader go seek out more work by this or that author.

Agree that the Stephen King story was most likely included at the publisher's insistence, and was trying to think of a suitable replacement. How about Theodore Sturgeon's sad and strange story of blood fetishist 'George Smith', Some Of Your Blood, which clocks in at approx. 130 pages?

[dem bones]

T. E. D. Klein - Nadelman's God: An advertising exec enjoys a freak and ultimately traumatic brush with minor celebrity when a rock band exhume his blasphemous (and seriously shite) poem from a 'sixties student mag, set it to music and record a version for their fourth album, Walpurgis Night. Jizzmo, fronted by Ray Minor, are a particularly rancid 'Satanic' metal combo in the mould of Twisted Sister, AC/DC and Iron Maiden. Nadelman's poem, Advent Of The Prometheans: A Cantata (he deserves all that's coming to him for the title alone), celebrates the coming of a God of hate and destruction to destroy Christianity. Minor renames it New God On The Block.

Arlen Huntoon, a fan of the group, takes it all very seriously. Using the lyrics as a recipe, he constructs an effigy in garbage, rotten offal and broken glass and sets it on the roof of his tenement block. He writes Nadelman a gushing fan letter thanking him for the inspiration and advising him on the God's activities. Against his better judgement, Nadelman replies, his fatal words of encouragement spurring a clearly unstable Huntoon to pester him both at home and in the office. Meanwhile, Huntoon's elderly downstairs neighbours, with whom he is in dispute over a dog fouling incident, disappear in mysterious circumstances. Huntoon hints that 'The Hungerer' is responsible, and anyone else who ever crossed him had better watch their step.

Nadelman knows he is being watched around the clock although, fortunately for him, he only catches the most fleeting glimpse of a stalker who stinks to high heaven. A series of grisly, unexplained murders convince him that Huntoon has successfully unleashed the vengeful God of his teenage imagination ...

The treasure trove of pop culture references include Woolworths, Rustler, cabbage patch dolls, "Motley Crue's grossest gig ever," The Heap from Skywald's Psycho, All Creatures Great And Small, backward masking, Judas Priest ...

[dem bones]

John Metcalfe - The Feasting Dead: (1954). Colonel Habgood, struggling to come to terms with the death of wife, Cecile, befriends a French widower and his two sons who are staying locally. It's agreed that the Colonel's little boy, Denis will holiday in Auvergne as a guest of M. Vaignon, whose own lads will spend their summer in Hampshire with Habgood. The exchange is repeated, Denis seemingly especially eager to get away, and the Colonel grows uncomfortable about the situation; what does he do over over there? Eventually, it is the Frenchman who ends the arrangement by cryptic letter, in which he suggests that he, Vaignon, is the victim of a "fantastic persecution or visitation," and it would be unforgivable for him to expose an innocent boy to such dangers any longer.

Denis is distraught that his visits to Auvergne are to be no more, as he'll no longer get to spend his days with Vaignon's gardener, Raoul Privache, with whom he has struck up a peculiar if not downright unhealthy friendship. But never fear — soon Privache arrives on the Colonel's doorstep, offering his services as a handyman. The boy near beseeches his father to agree, and Habgood is slow to deny the bereaved boy any consolation. Despite misgivings, he hires Privache, who moves into the loft.

The ever-mittened Privache is a queer one, and no mistake. He is a man seemingly bereft of personality, and no two people can agree on what his face looks like. Dogs cannot abide the man, undecided whether to run from or attack him. One day, he's savagely bitten on the arm which, to Dr. Goderich's astonishment, promptly mortifies. It just as swiftly heals completely when the handyman has spent time alone with the boy. Over the following days Denis, who has no appetite, grows wan, fatigued and wasted. His room is the focus of poltergeist activity. Habgood now detests Privache as either a paedophile, psychic vampire, or both, but still can't find it in him to dispense with the man's dubious services until, one day in the meadow, his anger gets the better of him. He grabs Raoul by the neck. The handyman wriggles free from his grasp and somehow vanishes in thin air.

Denis, furious at his father over his predatory playmate's departure, refuses to speak to or even share the same room with him. The separation does not last. While Habgood is attending the Regimental Dinner, Denis absconds across the channel aboard a fishing boat. His father, sensing the boy will be headed for Vaignon's château, gives chase, but can he save the boy from a parasitic, supernatural child molester?

Frightening as the situation was at home, it's when Habgood reaches the château that his morale hits rock bottom in the face of his son's trampish demeanor and refusal to see him, the deliberately uncommunicative locals who mock the legend of "the nameless" but fear it regardless, a wandering scarecrow in the field, and a gravestone in the ruined churchyard of St. Orvin commemorating the death of Raoul Privache in 1873. Thankfully, the loyal Dr. Goderich arrives to, if needs be, drag the boy away from the now invisible predator's influence. Much to Habgood's astonishment, the wreck of what was until recently his son, agrees to board the train home with them the following day, and does. But even now, the nightmare is not at an end.

[Middoth]

About Fengriffen:
Perhaps the best thing Case has given out in his career.
This author has a wonderful gift for storytelling and a very limited range of topics.

When he does not know what to write, he remembers about his own story "The Hunter" and copies it ad nauseam.

For many years I dreamed of reading "The Third Grave", and all because of the drawings of Stephen Fabian.
There is such a promising start: Arabian Desert, 2 archaeologists, one of whom is a very unreliable comrade.
And then the second chapter .... the action is transferred to England, murders in the swamps, perhaps wolves or werewolves are roaming nearby.
Not a bad but disappointing book.

I will not even undertake "Wolf Tracks", because the title itself with the synopsis give signals.

[dem bones]

L-R J. K. Potter: Joe Burleson:

Lucius Shepard - How the Wind Spoke at Madaket: (Asimov SF Magazine, April 1985). Arguably the least obvious choice for this book, but an inspired one. Following a painful divorce, author Peter Ramey rents a cottage in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to write a miserable novel, working title "How the Wind Spoke at Madaket." Ramey is cursed with precognition - his writings have a tendency to prophesy coming events - which lands him in trouble with police chief Hugh Weldon when a thirteen-year-old girl goes missing, her last known whereabouts the woodpile on the author's property. Ramey's novel-in-progress has a girl the same age torn apart by an elemental - "a violent, inhuman creature, part human, part animal" taken control of the wind. Weldon, not unreasonably, regards him a lunatic, more so when he's supported by local eccentric, 'Sconset Sally McColl, a sherry-addled psychic who lives aboard a lobster boat and dresses like a bag-lady. Sally, who claims to have witnessed the phenomena destroy a row of beach condominions, insists the elemental has been wrecking boats and killing folk for several decades. It takes the massacre of visitors to the whale museum - a freak 'tornado' deliberating launching harpoons at the party - for Weldon to reconsider. The lawman, Ramey and girlfriend Sara, Mills the boatman, and Sally, form an uneasy alliance against the vicious wind demon with no idea how to contain it. The death toll rises ...