|
Post by dem bones on Aug 26, 2009 9:48:49 GMT
Stephen Jones (ed) - The Mammoth Book of Werewolves (Robinson, 1994) Introduction: Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart - Stephen Jones
Clive Barker - Twilight at the Towers Scott Bradfield - The Dream of the Wolf Ramsey Campbell - Night Beat Angus Campbell (R. Chetwynd-Hayes) -The Werewolf Michael Marshall-Smith - Rain Falls Stephen Laws - Guilty Party Roberta Lannes - Essence of the Beast Mark Morris - Immortal Basil Copper - Cry Wolf Graham Masterton - Rug Justin Case (Hugh B. Cave) - The Whisperers David Sutton - And I Shall Go in the Devil’s Name Peter Tremayne - The Foxes of Fascoum Karl Edward Wagner - One Paris Night Brian Mooney - Soul of the Wolf Gans T. Field (Manly Wade Wellman) - The Hairy Ones Shall Dance Adrian Cole - Heart of the Beast Les Daniels - Wereman (aka ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’) Nicholas Royle - Anything But Your Kind Dennis Etchison - The Nighthawk David Case - The Cell Suzy McKee Charnas - Boobs Kim Newman - Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright…
Jo Fletcher - Bright of Moon (verse) With Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men soon to be upon us (November, according to Robinsons), thought it might be timely to revive this, as it seems as the ... Wolf Men includes a number of stories that appeared in the out of print Werewolves: Manly Wade Wellman's The Hairy Ones Shall Dance, Hugh B. Cave's The Whisperers, David Case's The Cell, Clive Barker's Twilight At The Towers and Suzy McKee Charnas's award-winning Boobs. "Also collected are memorable stories by contemporary masters Ramsey Campbell, Les Daniels, Stephen Laws, Scott Bradfield, Dennis Echison, Karl E. Wagner and many, many more". If, as was the case with the two versions of The Mammoth Book Of Vampires, Mr. Jones drops a few stories and commissions some originals, i hope he keeps the Tremayne, Sutton and Masterton efforts! I missed out on Werewolves - it seems quite difficult to find now - but can certainly vouch for the excellence of The Cell and Boobs. The Wellman is an enjoyable pulp romp, almost as entertaining as it’s title, and “The Whisperers” is a good example of Hugh B. Cave’s work for Spicy Mystery Stories. Basil Copper’s story began life as a chapter in his The Werewolf: In Legend, Fact And Art and would’ve been ideal as a story in an Amicus anthology. Thanks to Steve For the cover scan. Les Edwards?
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Sept 4, 2009 12:52:49 GMT
Stephen Jones (ed.) - The Mammoth Book Of Wolf Men (Robinson/ Running Press, 2009: Originally published as The Mammoth Book Of Werewolves, 1994) Joe Roberts Introduction: Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart - Stephen Jones
Clive Barker - Twilight at the Towers Scott Bradfield - The Dream of the Wolf Ramsey Campbell - Night Beat Angus Campbell (R. Chetwynd-Hayes) -The Werewolf Michael Marshall-Smith - Rain Falls Stephen Laws - Guilty Party Roberta Lannes - Essence of the Beast Mark Morris - Immortal Basil Copper - Cry Wolf Graham Masterton - Rug Justin Case (Hugh B. Cave) - The Whisperers David Sutton - And I Shall Go in the Devil’s Name Peter Tremayne - The Foxes of Fascoum Karl Edward Wagner - One Paris Night Brian Mooney - Soul of the Wolf Gans T. Field (Manly Wade Wellman) - The Hairy Ones Shall Dance Adrian Cole - Heart of the Beast Les Daniels - Wereman (aka ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’) Nicholas Royle - Anything But Your Kind Dennis Etchison - The Nighthawk David Case - The Cell Suzy McKee Charnas - Boobs Kim Newman - Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright…
Jo Fletcher - Bright of Moon (verse) As hoped, it is a new edition of the hard-to-find Mammoth Book Of Werewolves, reprinting all of the original content and adding Neil Gaiman's Only The End Of The World Again as a bonus.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Sept 6, 2009 13:08:39 GMT
I usually prefer Stephen Jones' theme anthologies over his 'Best New Horrors' and five in on Wolf Men, looks like this will be no exception. The Les Daniels and Suzy McKee Charnas stories are particularly recommended, and have at last found the "werewolf walks into a pub ..." story that's haunted me for ages. Taking them in no particular order.ha
Stephen Laws - Guilty Party: Fresh from a fierce Christmas drinking session in the Bay Horse Pub, Stuart finds himself lost on a country road thirteen miles from his home in Newcastle, with a menacing something stalking him through the trees. After a skirmish in which he flukily wounds the beast with a house-brick, Stuart makes for the solitary light in the distance indicating Crowfast Farm. And that's where his ruined night really takes a turn for the worse.
Suzy McKee Charnas - Boobs: Teenager Kelsey Bornstein, tormented by Billy Landon and his cronies at school, is transformed into a werewolf when her first period occurs simultaneous with a full moon. Once she recovers from her initial shock, Kelsey, far from being terrified, comes to adore her condition. Prowling the night and feasting on dogs, she is soon in great shape to wreak a terrible vengeance on her chief tormentor.
Les Daniels - Wereman: The nightmarish existence of a starving wolf who, on the night of the full moon, is doomed to spend several hours in the feeble, pink body of a human, shoving a trolley full of dead meat around the BIG STAR supermarket. The checkout girl is in for a shock ....
Michael Marshall Smith - Rain Falls: A huge grey dog lopes into Camden Town's The Porcupine (not its real name) where the narrator is enjoying a pint. No-one but him seems to notice the creature which is soon lost in the crowd. Presently, a lary guy in a grey coat emerges among the bunch of loudmouths at the bar who've been growing increasingly belligerent. It doesn't appear as though any of them know him, but they soon join in when he starts throwing punches at another group. The no-nonsense landlord appears, pool cue-handed, to restore order, while the instigator assists a bleeding man to the toilet ....
R. Chetwynd-Hayes -The Werewolf: Just the mere mention of the dread "by R. Chetwynd-Hayes" is too much information for some of our readers. Throw in "for children" ....
But The Werewolf is far better than its Armada Monster Book origins would suggest, mainly because he plays it straight. The Ferriers move from an industrial town to an isolated house on the moors. Young Alan is delighted with life at The Hermitage and makes full use of the opportunity to explore the surrounding countryside. Investigating the cellar of the crumbling, supposedly uninhabited 'High Barrow', he meets and befriends an unkempt young man with a hacking cough and agrees to run errands for him, the guy being something of an invalid. Meanwhile, Mr. Ferrier takes to spending his evenings in The Grape & Barleycorn where he gets pally with local farmer Charley Brinkley. Something that looks like a dog but walks on its hind legs is mutilating Charley's sheep and Alan's dad agrees to help hunt it down ..
some I made earlier:
David Case - The Cell: For one night every month the narrator locks himself away in the padded cell he's had built in the basement. He's a werewolf or at least, that's what he's desperately trying to convince anybody who finds his diary and, most of all, himself. How could such an upstanding citizen inspire banner headlines of the Sex Fiend Murder or Mangled Corpse In Lovers Lane variety? It's preposterous! He even considers suing for libel ...
Helen, the long-suffering wife he half patronises to death, entertains his bizarre behaviour out of fear but when she realises that he's most likely the man the police are after, her curiosity gets the better of her: what happens to him when he's in the cell ....?
If you can imagine The Beast In The Cellar as told from the point of view of the pathetic "monster" with maybe a dash of Carry on Psycho thrown in, then you've maybe some idea of what Case's minor masterpiece of gallows humour is like. That it works has everything to do with Case's deadpan delivery and his economic prose really suits - it makes a sixty pager read like twenty.
Basil Copper - Cry Wolf: A werewolf subjects the people of a snowbound French village to a reign of terror. The narrator and his boy, Andrew, join the hunt for the creature which has already torn the throats from sheep and children before it takes out a few stray adults. It's as traditional a story as these things get and you guess the culprit early. But nagging doubts remains: did they get the right person?
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Sept 8, 2009 6:36:25 GMT
Another pair of winners. The first, probably qualifies as Jack the Ripper fiction, the second a typically entertaining romp from the Spicy range. Mark Morris - Immortal: Stalybridge, Cheshire. Detective Inspector Farrow leads the hunt for a serial killer dubbed "The Wolfman' who rips the faces from his young female victims and tears open their bodies. His latest, a twenty-three year old barmaid at The Crow's Nest, is his fifth in a month and still no clues. Farrow's fluid regard for timekeeping and general indifference (he spends most of his shift in the pub) is badly affecting the morale of his overworked men. D. S. Christopher Jackson is among those who think it would be a mercy - not least to Farrow - if he were quietly withdrawn from the investigation. Working late in his office, Jackson receives a call from the killer requesting a meeting at the disused railway station ... This is bloody brilliant! Soon as i finished it, i had a trawl through the archives to see what other stories of his i had hanging around unread, 'cause up 'til now he's been a blind spot to me give or take a few other class shorts. Hugh B. Cave - The Whisperers: Newlyweds Peter and Annie Winslow buy the old Prentiss Place, blissfully unaware of the community who live beyond the cellar wall - whispering. Soon Peter learns of the tragedy that befell the previous family: Jim Callister, initially a cheerful, robust fellow, grew haggard, pale, hairy and mad after spending too much time in that cellar until his wife was forced to poison him - and now the same thing is happening to Peter! The werewolves' whispers get inside a man's head until he's driven to provide them with female flesh. Callister's little daughter is Peter's first contribution: next up - Annie! Meanwhile, Doc Everett Digby ("the hand he offered me was like a wet rubber glove"), has rounded up the villagers for an attack on the evil premises ... This doesn't read like your usual Spicy Mystery Story - where are all the references to Annie's "heaving mounds"? what happened to the gratuitous whipping scene? - but this is a "revised" version, so best to check it against the original in MurgunstrummLater: Peter Tremayne - The Foxes of Fascoum: What i like most about several of Tremayne's supernatural stories is the way he takes a Celtic legend and adapts it for intelligent but recognisably pulp thrillers. The Foxes of Fascoum, set in the Comeragh mountains, Co. Waterford, is a perfect example. During the Great Starvation of the 1840's, Jasper Mountmayne, the suitably despicable Lord of the Manor, was responsible for the death of a peasant woman who intervened on behalf of a pregnant vixen his hounds were intent on tearing to pieces. Her distraught husband, Black John, swore a curse that seven generations of Mountmayne's would pay for the death of his wife. Cut to the present day and our narrator, Harlyn Trezela, is scouting the mountains on behalf of his rock-climbing club back home in Sheffield. Stopping in at 'Dan's Bar', Trezela learns of the curse and a tricky skeleton in his family's wardrobe ... Ramsey Campbell - Night Beat: Rookie Police Constable Sloane is so upset by the sight of a mutilated body dumped in an alley on his patch that his superiors discreetly withdraw him from the manhunt. Yet he knows intuitively that the murders are in some way connected to the Museum-cum-Planetarium ... This slight, EC-inspired offering first appeared in Marvel's short-lived Haunt Of Horror (June 1973). Campbell recently included it in his Inconsequential Tales so evidently he's not a big fan of it.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Nov 2, 2009 22:19:07 GMT
Karl E. Wagner - One Paris Night: French-Prussian war, May 1830; Colonel Adrian Becker, "a distant offspring of Kane", and his partner in mischief, Sir Stanley Sutton, recently rescued from a firing squad, are taking refuge in a ruined Cathedral in the capital. It's a lousy hideout; the floor is strewn with the corpses of priests and nuns, the victims of a Communard massacre, and they'd be miles from here were it not for his lordship having just been shot in the arse while taking advantage of a prostitute in a sporting house. The crazy Frenchman who wounded him was evidently under the impression that Sutton was 'Bertrand', rumoured locally to be loup garou.
This all sounds like so much superstitious peasant babble to Sir Stanley, but when Becker fires at the wolf creature prowling the rubble only for his direct hit to have no effect, it's clear the locals have it right. To add to their problems, Becker is almost crushed to death under low-flying chorus girl Jacqueline from the brothel when she's sent flying through the air by a stray shell. It's a dicey situation. Bertrand is currently feasting on remains of nun but "while the moon is full, nothing can sate his bloodlust!", and he prefers living flesh to dead. They need silver bullets in a hurry. That battered old chalice-looking thing will do ....
|
|
pb210
New Face In Hell
Posts: 4
|
Post by pb210 on Dec 5, 2009 13:31:36 GMT
Can anyone any series of novels about a werewolf? You know how you have vampire detective series? Any werewolf equivalent?
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Dec 5, 2009 14:39:42 GMT
Gary Brander's The Howling (Hamlyn, 1978) has at least a couple of sequels, Return Of The Howling (1979) and The Howling III: Echoes (1985). If you're feeling adventurous, Dragan Vujic has been knocking them out at an alarming rate over the past decade ... Tender Kiss Of A Russian Werewolf, etc.
|
|
|
Post by paulfinch on Dec 9, 2009 0:03:54 GMT
Can anyone any series of novels about a werewolf? You know how you have vampire detective series? Any werewolf equivalent? THE WOLF'S HOUR, by Robert McCammon, certainly should have been. Don't know if you remember that one, but it concerns a werewolf who works as a secret agent for the British during World War Two. He isn't some politically correct, pitiful manbeast who despises his condition, but a fearsome predator of the night who gives full rein to his lusts when the mood, and the fur, is on him - though you won't be surprised to learn that the Nazis are infinitely more evil and frightening. It provided an utterly riveting read when it first came out around 1990. A sequel, or two, would have been most welcome, as would a movie adaptation, though it wouldn't be possible to realise such a tale cheaply and there, sadly, lies the problem.
|
|
|
Post by billdemo2 on May 18, 2010 9:44:25 GMT
Just picked up the Wolf Men edition and read a few of the stories.
The Basil Copper effort "Cry Wolf" is quite good and reminds me of some of the werewolf stories that appeared in EC Comics' Tales From The Crypt. Having read another of his stories (the excellent and chilling Halloween-themed "Candle in the Skull") I have actually been persuaded to shell out a relatively large sum for his recently-published two-volume "best of" collection. I hope his other stories are just as good. His plain but readable style and solid plotting remind me of Joseph Payne Brennan.
Hugh B. Cave's The Whisperers was also surprisingly good, building up a strange and tense atmosphere.
The stand-out story for me in this collection is definitely Graham Masterton's "Rug". Until now, I had dismissed his as a schlocky sex-blood-n-guts type author, but this story really impressed me. I'm thinking I should probably search out some of his other short work and give it a chance.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 19, 2010 17:17:50 GMT
Glad you're enjoying it, Bill. this has easily been one of my favourite 'Mammoth's to date and I must get around to finishing it off (got bogged down in the Kim Newman story and switched to something else).
|
|
|
Post by goathunter on Jun 19, 2016 21:55:25 GMT
Can anyone any series of novels about a werewolf? You know how you have vampire detective series? Any werewolf equivalent? THE WOLF'S HOUR, by Robert McCammon, certainly should have been. Don't know if you remember that one, but it concerns a werewolf who works as a secret agent for the British during World War Two. He isn't some politically correct, pitiful manbeast who despises his condition, but a fearsome predator of the night who gives full rein to his lusts when the mood, and the fur, is on him - though you won't be surprised to learn that the Nazis are infinitely more evil and frightening. It provided an utterly riveting read when it first came out around 1990. A sequel, or two, would have been most welcome, as would a movie adaptation, though it wouldn't be possible to realise such a tale cheaply and there, sadly, lies the problem. My reply is seven years late, but a sequel of sorts was published in 2011. The Hunter from the Woods is a collection of stories and novellas featuring Michael Gallatin, the main character from The Wolf's Hour. Also, Universal bought a screenplay based on The Wolf's Hour (written by Bradley and Kevin Marcus) in January 2014. But there's been nary a peep out of Universal about it since then. Hunter
|
|
|
Post by bobby on Jun 21, 2016 23:03:27 GMT
Can anyone any series of novels about a werewolf? You know how you have vampire detective series? Any werewolf equivalent? There's the Kitty Norville series by Carrie Vaughn, currently up to fourteen novels and one short story collection.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Aug 4, 2017 8:03:54 GMT
In his The Essential Guide To Werewolf Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), Brian J. Frost nominates The Mammoth Book Of The Werewolf as probably the outstanding anthology on the theme to date and I'm not about to argue - it is without doubt the finest I've read since his own superlative Book of The Werewolf way back in 1975. You're advised to go with the Wolfman edition if only for the bonus story (and it's most likely the cheaper).
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Apr 29, 2018 19:34:29 GMT
Dennis Etchison - The Nighthawk: (Charles L. Grant [ed], Shadows, 1978). On the death of their parents in a house fire (or so everyone insists), Sally and Joel were adopted by their kindly grandparents. Recently Joel has grown increasingly withdrawn to the point where even his sister struggles to reach him. Sally has her own problems. Something has clawed her best friend's pony and the little girl will no longer talk to her. Worse, Sally is remembering events surrounding the tragedy and wondering if it is all starting again? There's an almost fairytale feel to this one, a poignant tale of filial devotion even on the discovery that your brother or sister is a monster, however reluctant.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Jul 13, 2018 18:01:15 GMT
Brian Mooney - Soul of the Wolf: "His years of badgering Congressmen and the Secretary of State, his years of making certain generous donations to party and private funds, his years of threatening those with less than pure private lives before the precious licence had been agreed, all had been worthwhile."
Nugent, big game hunter, defies idiot Chinook superstition and refuses to slit the throat of the huge timber wolf he's bagged, thereby trapping its soul. Fearful of retribution from the creature's spirit, the "goddamn primitives" perform a ceremony to free "Brother Wolf." Nugent, possessed by the creature's soul, takes to hunting human prey on the streets at night. Hateful of conservationists ("Christ damn the Greens... Bastards just about had the world sewn up these days") and mankind in general, Nugent tears up a tramp, an insomniac, a jogger, two teenage lovers and three gang members on his initial foray. The cops first suspicion is that some irresponsible moron let a pack of fighting-Mastiff's loose on the city.
Meanwhile, in his private life, Nugent is despised by trophy mistress Marianna who taunts him over his inability to get a hard on these days, killing endangered species and mounting heads having taken long precedence over mounting Marianna. We sense she'll be improbably fortunate to survive this story.
Proper enjoyable modern pulp horror. Very recommended as is entire anthology in either of its guises.
|
|