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Post by franklinmarsh on Jun 18, 2009 13:12:34 GMT
- he still put the boot in at the central point - buying it. You're not wrong there, Craig. It would be churlish to moan about the only rave review I've had (out of two) but it would seem our critic prefers lighthearted pulpy stuff to more considered offerings. At least with an antho different strokes can sit side by side, and as Pulps notes he has gone to the trouble of saying that he really didn't want to read it (a freebie too! Hope you didn't sign it, Chas), so it really is a double edged sword. I hope hordes of Americans aren't descending on their local bookstores and tearing out 33 pages. He won't be getting a copy of your anthology then, Lurks?
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Jun 19, 2009 21:46:28 GMT
He won't be getting a copy of your anthology then, Lurks? I'm almost tempted out of sheer devilry.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 23, 2010 11:22:07 GMT
Re-reading Mr. Mains' With Deepest Sympathy for the advent thread reminded me that i never did vomit forth any pearls of wisdom about 4th Black Book Of Horror, so have made it my official antho-to-get-me-through-Christmas selection (sorry in advance to all parties). Can't remember if these are representative, but plenty of references to porn so far - the Gary McMahon story, which, lucky for the author, has so far defied my "talent" for synopsis, evidently wishes us to know that we're all blow up dolls - and the first three are straight out of the Martin Waddell/ Syd J. Bounds school if you get me. Hazel Quinn - Flies: Bluebottle holocaust! A broiling hot day and there's domineering Dulcie Faeroe stuck in the kitchen, windows shut tight to keep out the flies. Yeah, good luck with that one, Mrs. F! Despite tooling up with every insecticide known to man, Dulcie, bumbling husband George and the fruit cake find themselves under siege from the sinister swarm. Johnny Mains - With Deepest Sympathy: Mrs Primrose Hildebrand, widowed for forty of her sixty-seven years, the most feared individual in the village of Effingham-on-the-Stour on account of her uncanny knack for winkling out her neighbours' juiciest secrets. Primrose's weapon is the sympathy card. No sooner has she read of a bereavement in the local paper than she's firing off her poisonous condolences, exposing the darker side of the late lamented to the party left grief-stricken by their passing. Her vindictiveness stems from the shock discovery she made shortly after the untimely death of husband Ralph, namely that far from being a candidate for canonization, Mr. Hildebrand was an industrious pornographer with a collection of saucy snaps to shame Old Compton Street. Now someone is out to cut her down to size, but who? Franklin Marsh - All Hallow’s Even: Giles De Ray wages war on the slumbering village of Muffin-on-the-Marsh (pop. thirty) because he detests Halloween so while they give every impression that they like it. Seeing as they're so fond of death, he pulls on a black cowl, grabs a machete and sets out on a creepy crawl. Lily Stalybridge is first to go (Giles demonstrates some nifty footwork, playing keepy-up with her head before booting it into the sink), then he takes a lethal swipe at her screaming sister. Cyril Jackson (official village bully), the innocent little infants in their shit trick-or-treat costumes, local legend 'Pete the Paedo', even Rev. Montague Groyne, the porn-perusing prelate of St. St. Jacobs - none are a match for Death's swishing scythe! I don't have that many fingers to tally up the body count, but it's impressive. Any other night, and Giles would probably have gotten away with it ....
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Post by dem bones on Dec 25, 2010 8:03:06 GMT
Ian C. Strachan - The Devil Looks After His Own?: Sussex. Nigel Woodford leaves his native New York for England where he knows the poor little rich girls will fall for his Mr. Charming routine. Nigel is a marry-and-murder-'em-for-the-insurance merchant who makes good use of the priest's hole hidden away in the plush home he inherited from Sarah (victim #2). But Sarah's fiercely possessive streak survives the grave and while Nigel dithers over how best to dispose of jolly Jennifer, the 21 year old heiress, his late second wife does the job for him - very messily - leaving him in a dreadful quandary.
Gary McMahon - Love is in the Air: Away from home on business, professional type dials a prostitute from Love is in the Air Inc. It's a fun session while it lasts, if ultimately a deflating experience for both parties. But the customer is not so put out that he won't use the service again.
Sexual politics, the eternal struggle between want and need, real people and blow-up dolls: spot the difference, etc. You're right. I didn't understand a word of it.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 30, 2010 18:46:03 GMT
Craig Herbertson - Soup: Quite possibly the most beautifully written example of cannibal torture porn i've ever read! A secret country house in the North of England, nice and secluded. Peters, Captain Dunning and his beautiful wife, Jennifer, are among the lucky few invited to dine with the Farantino, a gourmet of unparallelled genius, universally acclaimed for his soup tureen. The guests are doubtless still congratulating themselves on their good fortune when Farantino has them escorted to a dungeon to assist in the preparation of the soup of the day. He's the de Sade of the celebrity chef set and this freebie feast comes at a terrible cost.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 30, 2010 20:05:36 GMT
Craig Herbertson - Soup: Quite possibly the most beautifully written example of cannibal torture porn i've ever read! A secret country house in the North of England, nice and secluded. Peters, Captain Dunning and his beautiful wife, Jennifer, are among the lucky few invited to dine with the Farantino, a gourmet of unparallelled genius, universally acclaimed for his soup tureen. The guests are doubtless still congratulating themselves on their good fortune when Farantino has them escorted to a dungeon to assist in the preparation of the soup of the day. He's the de Sade of the celebrity chef set and this freebie feast comes at a terrible cost. Expect this to be quoted endlessly Dem. In fact, I may well begin introducing your kind remarks into every conceivable conversation regardless of the previous subject. I am gobsmacked!
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Post by dem bones on Dec 31, 2010 16:37:18 GMT
Looks as though Soup will be the last horror story I read before the terrible tens are upon us, Craig, so am glad to have gone out on such a delightfully unpleasant one. Fitting to end the decade reading a Black Book, too, as the series has made a huge impression on me. Coming into the 'noughties, I'd become disillusioned with contemporary horror fiction to the point where I just stopped bothering with it, but Charlies project captured my imagination, gave me back my old enthusiasm and set me to tracking down more work by a number of his regulars. If Paperback Fanatic was pulp fiend's heaven and the Wordsworth editions satisfied the lust for Gothic, Victorian & Edwardian supernatural fiction, the Black Book of Horror is the 00's series I'll look back on with the greatest affection. Throw in this board (when it's going through one of its sporadic good weeks, at any rate), the TYPE bookshop [you can substitute the latter with your own favourite local haunt] and that's the core of a scene in itself, the scene as far as my own interests lie.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 31, 2010 16:57:10 GMT
Watch out for the various ghouls of Hogmany.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 5, 2011 10:51:52 GMT
Paul Finch - Words: Eight months after the death of his wife, Sarah, best-selling author Cameron Wade takes up temporary residence in Whitethorn village, Gloucestershire, to try and cure his writers block, get his career back on track. He's intent on producing a supernatural thriller based on the macabre local legend of Alice Fairwood, a young woman accused of witchcraft and beaten to death in the pillory back in 1634. Cameron is particularly keen to discover the exact nature of her dying curse, hoping for his readers' sake that it's something juicy - a plague of boils or some hideous deformity visited upon the first born, that kind of thing - but the dead girl was altogether more subtle in her vengeance. With the increasingly paranoid Wade driven to the brink of madness by visions of his dead wife, Alice picks her moment to give a final twist of the mental thumbscrews ...
The weird business involving the ghostly stiletto heels and the monkey in the attic is an attention grabber and worst pub landlady fans are sure to appreciate pleasantly plump forty-something Martine Culpepper of The Whitethorn Arms, even if it's hardly her fault she runs such a sinister establishment.
Joel Lane - A Cry For Help: A year after his lover Janice slit her wrists, Carl, a private health insurance salesman, finds himself at a convention in Harrogate. Away from the hotel he has plenty of chances to make amends for his neglect of the dead girl - the down-at-heel locals all seem intent on taking their own lives - but for Carl, the failed, the broken down and the needy are of no use to him unless he can find some way of exploiting their suffering as a business opportunity. Eventually he hits on a tidy little earner.
More horror with a social conscience so i'm not the best person to comment, but, if i read this right, Mr. Lane has written a fable on how unfeeling, self absorbed and greedy we've been encouraged to become as a society. Carl, as despicable as he is, is as much a tragic figure as Janice, the old man under the bridge and the suicidal youth by the roadside because he's only doing as he's been taught.
Are there any giant praying mantis stories in this one?
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Post by dem bones on Jan 8, 2011 11:36:55 GMT
David A. Sutton - Dead Water: Off to France for some right proper horror now, and amazingly, my prayers are answered - kind of. No mantids (© Craig Herbertson), but who's worried when you've a plague of parasites?
Fifty-something's Brian and Harry are holidaying with their wives on the salt-marshes of the Camargue. The men are dedicated bird-watchers, fiercely competitive in their rivalry. While the wives are off horse-riding, the two men stray beyond a barely legible warning sign and, engrossed in their hobby, come sundown, find themselves hopelessly lost. Wheeling their bicycles through the steamy swampland in the pitch dark, Brian and Harry are soon separated and the latter grows increasingly panic-stricken. He's only too aware that the place is running alive with mosquitoes, but they're far from his worst concern. Bruised and bleeding, he extracts his bare legs from a squelchy patch and finally understands what the rotting signpost was a warning against.
What I liked most about Dead Water is that it hints at several possible outcomes (my oh-so-educated guess, involving the corpses of centuries dead Burgundians rising from the quagmire, was way wide of the mark!) - but when the moment arrives it's as unexpected as it is horrific.
Reggie Oliver - The Head: Chelsea. Ed Trewin, a young cab-driver from East London, befriends fabulously wealthy, larger than life art critic and dealer, Ronald Pattinson. Soon Ed is acting as Ron's unofficial personal chauffeur while the elderly gent is taking him around the galleries, giving him a solid grounding in modern art which the ambitious cabbie plans to study for a degree ("Tracey Emin has only one subject, herself, and that is a lamentably inadequate one ... Late Picasso is the work of a highly gifted senile delinquent ..."). Pattinson's health is in rapid decline and when the doctor breaks it to him that he's only months to live, he prevails upon Ed to assist his suicide for a tidy recompense. Ed agrees, soon wishes he hadn't when he realises Pattinson is going for it big time. After he's taken a lethal overdose at his French bolt-hole, he wants Ed to first strangle him and then dismember the corpse. He's specific that the head must be boxed up, weighed down with stones and dropped from the ferry mid-ocean as he always fancied burial at sea. Ed manages to perform all the grisly bits - bar one.
from those few sampled to date, it's clear Reggie Oliver's stories don't lend themselves to my crap, sub-generic way with a plot summary (almost got through this without mentioning the portrait by Francis Bacon which likely holds the key to Ed's mental breakdown), while the classical allusions and, I suspect, some very wicked jokes, fly miles above my uneducated head. So how comes I still find him a joy to read in that very Robert Aickman kind of way?
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Oct 13, 2012 1:24:58 GMT
I thought "Soup" was an excellent story, very elegantly told, the understated telling of the extremely grim events adding to the horror in ways that outpourings of "raw emotion" simply wouldn't. I just had the pleasure of reading "Soup," my first Craig Herbertson story. I enjoyed it hugely and am certain that I will remember it for a long time to come. Like Lurker, I thought the understated tone was essential to the story--it provided the counterpoint to ground all of the baroque horrors.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 13, 2012 19:10:07 GMT
I just had the pleasure of reading "Soup," my first Craig Herbertson story. I enjoyed it hugely and am certain that I will remember it for a long time to come. Like Lurker, I thought the understated tone was essential to the story--it provided the counterpoint to ground all of the baroque horrors. The Mall, Craig's contribution to Volume 9, is another absolute peach, though book lovers - Paperback Fanatic and Vault vet's of a certain bent in particular - will find it hard going! Up there with The Anatomy Lesson and Life Expectancy as my picks of another very strong selection of stories (still have six to go). A collection of Herbertson horrors is so long overdue it's painful.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Oct 15, 2012 7:42:52 GMT
I just had the pleasure of reading "Soup," my first Craig Herbertson story. I enjoyed it hugely and am certain that I will remember it for a long time to come. Like Lurker, I thought the understated tone was essential to the story--it provided the counterpoint to ground all of the baroque horrors. The Mall, Craig's contribution to Volume 9, is another absolute peach, though book lovers - Paperback Fanatic and Vault vet's of a certain bent in particular - will find it hard going! Up there with The Anatomy Lesson and Life Expectancy as my picks of another very strong selection of stories (still have six to go). A collection of Herbertson horrors is so long overdue it's painful. thanks folks. I am humbled by your comments. I have to wait until November 8th to get my next black Horror injection. Its always hard to pick favourite stories because there's so many damned good ones and I find I keep keep changing my mind. The series goes from strength to strength and its just an honour to be sitting in the cast.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Oct 15, 2012 11:34:23 GMT
thanks folks. I am humbled by your comments. Just remember: The first words that you said to me on this board were, "Hi. You have good taste." ;D
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 15, 2012 11:35:50 GMT
A collection of Herbertson horrors is so long overdue it's painful. I couldn't agree more!
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