Dennis Wheatley - Shafts Of Fear/ Quiver Of Horror

[dem bones]

Dennis Wheatley (ed.) - Shafts Of Fear (Arrow, 1964)

Introduction - Dennis Wheatley

Evelyn Waugh - The Man Who Liked Dickens
Martin Armstrong - The Pipe-Smoker
Michael Joseph - A Glass Of Milk
William Hope Hodgson - The Island Of The Ud
William Hope Hodgson - The Derelict
T. F. Powys - The House With The Echo
A. E. Coppard - Arabesque: The Mouse
Alec Waugh - The Last Chukka
Charles Birkin - A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts
Thomas Burke - The Bird
Guy de Maupassant - Vendetta
James Hilton - The Mallet
Hugh Walpole - The Silver Mask
C. E. Montague - The First Blood Sweep
John Russell - The Fourth Man
John Russell - The Price Of The Head
John Russell - The Lost God
Ambrose Bierce - A Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge
Dennis Wheatley - The Snake

Selections from the Wheatley-edited 1024 paged A Century Of Horror with a new introduction (repeated in companion volume A Quiver Of Horror) with an additional story by author Charles Birkin who Dennis hails as some kind of recent discovery! Although much of this material is easily obtainable elsewhere, the Montague and Birkin stories are comparatively rare and (trust me) Shafts Of Fear is worth getting just for them.

Hugh Walpole - The Silver Mask: Kensington, West London. Miss Sonia Herries, 50, falls foul of her good nature when she invites a starving, exceptionally handsome young man into her lavish home when he stops her in the street. Henry Abbott makes no bones of his daily business - "I am a pimp, a thief, a what you like - anything bad" - but he has the nicest smile and a fine eye for beautiful objects like that silver clown's mask on the wall. After a good feed Abbott returns to his starving wife Ada and their baby leaving Miss Herries unmolested, her possessions ditto (save for a valuable cigarette box which he later returns). Over the next weeks he insinuates his way into her life until he and his ghastly relatives have ousted her altogether.

Hints of the supernatural but E. F. Bleiler got it spot on when he classified the story a case of "social vampirism". Needless to say, it's excellent.

Charles Birkin - A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts: SS men Dorsch and Fochtmann arrange an amusing diversion for Oberst Albrecht. Five half-dead Jewish prisoners are selected to take part in a competition. A "coconut shy" has been arranged, a row of grotesque dummies decorated to depict enemies of the Reich. Cohn, Blumenthal, Wolf, Mendel and Ullman are told that the four who score the most direct hits to the head of their particular target will be given 'lighter' duties and a better chance to salvage scraps of food for their wives and children. The loser will be returned to the labour camp. Barely able to lift the heavy steel balls, the men take their turns ...

Depending on your viewpoint - and A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts certainly divides opinion - either Birkin's most unforgivable work, or his bravest. It is certainly not a story you're likely to forget.

Thomas Burke - The Bird: Captain Chudder gets a young Chinese drunk and whisks him aboard the S.S. Peacock to keep him entertained during the voyage. Every night Sung Dee’s shrieks for mercy are heard from the cabin but nobody thinks to intervene on account of Chudder’s white parrot. The bird acts as his master’s eyes and ears among the crew, and all are agreed that there’s something uncanny about it. Back on dry land, the ill-used boy seeks his revenge.

One of the stories that Peter Penzoldt got so upset about in his The Supernatural In Fiction on account of its “descriptions of sadism” (A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts would finish him!). It’s certainly ghastly enough, but just what the Captain does to the boy is alluded to as opposed to lovingly gloated over.

A. E. Coppard - Arabesque: The Mouse: Very difficult to summarise, not for nothing has this been described as Coppard's "most enigmatic story", but it's beautifully written as you'd expect, and ... here goes:

Filip, alienated and "driven half mad by reading Russian novels", sits in his bleak room reminiscing over his tragic life and watching the antics of a mouse as it scavenges for food. He finds the little creature strangely fascinating but won't remove the trap in the cupboard for fear of being overrun. Sure enough, the mouse makes for the cupboard.

The tragic life I mentioned: The nadir was when his mother had to have both hands amputated when a heavy cart collapsed on her. She died soon afterward and he still dreams of bleeding stumps. The incident has stunted him and he's never loved ... save for that one brief encounter with the young and exuberant beauty, Cassie, at the village fair. We never learn the outcome of their night together as Coppard cleverly cuts away to the snap of the mousetrap at the crucial point, but I get the strong impression that Filip had an "all beauty must die" moment ...

Filip checks the trap: the mouse has survived ... but it has been mutilated in much the same manner as his dead mother. He performs a mercy killing - a brutal one - and hurls the tiny rodent corpse into the street. Overcome by grief he goes out looking for it. But not before he's reset the trap.

Evelyn Waugh - The Man Who Liked Dickens: Brazil. The hapless Mr. Henty, the sole survivor of the ill-fated Anderson expedition is taken in and cared for by McMasters, an Englishman who has lived in the jungle among the Shiriana Indians for close on sixty years. McMasters is illiterate and his pleasure is having others read to him so - once he has recovered from malaria - the grateful Henty obliges the old boy with some chapters from mouldering copies of Bleak House & Co. Worryingly, he finds his rescuer stoically silent on the subject of his return to civilisation and it is soon clear that McMasters will stop at nothing to preserve his daily dose of Dickens …

Guy De Maupassant - Vendetta: When her son is murdered the widow Saverini swears vengeance. But how can an old woman and a gaunt sheepdog overcome a robust young killer? It’s amazing what you can do with some bales of straw, your husband’s old clothes and a string of black pudding.

Dennis Wheatley - The Snake: Carstairs amuses Jackson and the narrator with the story behind his rags to riches success, all of it due, he believes, to black magic. In South Africa, he’d worked as book keeper to Isaacson, a despicable loan shark who’d one day crossed swords with Umtunga, the local witch-doctor over an outstanding debt (after penalties, Umtunga owed him thirty women). Unimpressed at this rudeness, Umtunga promptly performed a cockerel sacrifice on the usurer’s doorstep, and that night the loan shark died horribly. His widow then ordered Carstairs to call in the debt. Through more luck than judgment, he survives a were-mamba attack and decides it’s time to cut a deal with the voodoo guy at Mrs. Isaacson’s expense. He’s never looked back.

To be continued ....

[redbrain]

admin said:

Charles Birkin - A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts: SS men Dorsch and Fochtmann arrange an amusing diversion for Oberst Albrecht. Five half-dead Jewish prisoners are selected to take part in a competition. A "coconut shy" has been arranged, a row of grotesque dummies decorated to depict enemies of the Reich. Cohn, Blumenthal, Wolf, Mendel and Ullman are told that the four who score the most direct hits to the head of their particular target will be given 'lighter' duties and a better chance to salvage scraps of food for their wives and children. The loser will be returned to the labour camp. Barely able to lift the heavy steel balls, the men take their turns ...

Depending on your viewpoint - and A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts certainly divides opinion - either Birkin's most unforgivable work, or his bravest. It is certainly not a story you're likely to forget.

[/center][/quote]

I think I veer to the unforgivable camp.

[David A. Riley]

I don't think I would veer either way, it's simply not the kind of story I personally care for. Not my cup of tea, if you like. Then again, I have a bias. I prefer my horror stories to have some element of the supernatural about them. I am not particularly interested in common or garden sadism - or torture porn as it is sometimes referred to these days, particularly with regard to films like Hostel or the Saw series.

There used to be a debate years ago about whether stories about death camps, etc could legitimately be used in horror stories. The feeling then was no, I think. Not that this would have had any impact on individual writers.

Although a number of people think very highly of Charles Birkin's stories, including John Pelan, who has published collections of his stories, I have never personally been all that enthusiastic about them. I used to like Robert Bloch's psych-type stories, but that may be because I always found them slightly humorous (leastways, I could never take them seriously!), with some intriguing twists. Birkin's stories, on the other hand, are completely serious - and intentionally so.

David

[redbrain]

davidriley said:

I don't think I would veer either way, it's simply not the kind of story I personally care for. Not my cup of tea, if you like. Then again, I have a bias. I prefer my horror stories to have some element of the supernatural about them. I am not particularly interested in common or garden sadism - or torture porn as it is sometimes referred to these days, particularly with regard to films like Hostel or the Saw series.

There used to be a debate years ago about whether stories about death camps, etc could legitimately be used in horror stories. The feeling then was no, I think. Not that this would have had any impact on individual writers.

Although a number of people think very highly of Charles Birkin's stories, including John Pelan, who has published collections of his stories, I have never personally been all that enthusiastic about them. I used to like Robert Bloch's psych-type stories, but that may be because I always found them slightly humorous (leastways, I could never take them seriously!), with some intriguing twists. Birkin's stories, on the other hand, are completely serious - and intentionally so.

David

Birkin isn't my cup of tea, either. Like you, I prefer my stories to have some element of the supernatural about them. Or, to be more precise, an element of otherness or the outside. Lovecraft's stories, for example, are often not supernatural (although some of them are). But all the best ones contain quasi-supernatural elements of otherness.

I gave Birkin more than a fair try. I used to own two or three of the Tandem collections of his stories - and read at least two of them. Reading his stuff made me feel dirty. (As did some of the Pan horrors.)

Stories relying consensual sado-masochism (Philip Jose Farmer's The Image of the Beast, for example) are quite another matter, as are stories featuring cruelty as part of a larger picture of human interaction. I have to add this paragraph because my own Of Bondlings and Blesh features both consensual sado-masochism and cruelty as part of a larger picture of human interaction.

[dem bones]

I love Birkin's work both as author and anthologist but I've taken a break from him for some months as his later books - So Pale, So Cold, So Fair and Spawn Of Satan (which, criminally, still hasn't seen UK publication) in particular - are hard work if you're not up for being depressed out of your skull. If you're looking for supernatural content, he makes more use of it than perhaps you realise, but you're right: the bulk is in the tradition of Poe at his most disturbed and disturbing, the Grand Guignol and - as I think John Pelan pointed out - Angus Wilson in Raspberry Jam mode.

Writing about 'Wolf Kruger' (Shaun Hutson)'s Nazisploitation novel Sledgehammer in the current Paperback Fanatic, Justin observes that, by basing some of the executions on real instances of same from WWII, Hutson "ventures into territory which escapist fiction should avoid", a comment that is surely worthy of its own thread: is there such territory? Where do you draw the line?

I find Birkin's story laudable. In my world at least, it's not the piece of cheap exploitation that some seem to take it but a howl of sheer disgust.

But I can see why people dislike it - and him.

[redbrain]

admin said:

Writing about 'Wolf Kruger' (Shaun Hutson)'s Nazisploitation novel Sledgehammer in the current Paperback Fanatic, Justin observes that, by basing some of the executions on real instances of same from WWII, Hutson "ventures into territory which escapist fiction should avoid", a comment that is surely worthy of its own thread: is there such territory? Where do you draw the line?

The word escapist is probably important in the quote.

It occurs to me that you may not regard Birkin's work as escapist fiction. And - if it is escapist - I wonder from what it is escaping.

[dem bones]

I find a lot of it is sick escapist fun - how about the little girl who's head is run over by a steamroller? - but during his 'sixties revival stories like ... Coconuts and the equally grim Waiting For Trains are more like war journalism and I certainly don't find anything too escapist about either.

I think the fact that Coconuts was written by a Grand Guignol merchant like Birkin - whose work I've often seen dismissed - once as "tricked up sadism" - may have something to do with the adverse reaction. You know: "Is he making fun of war crimes now?"

Des, as you did with Aickman and Ligotti, I tried to revisit all Birkin's stories (minus one book I'm short) over a year but I don't have your stamina!

[Calenture]

admin said:

I find Birkin's story laudable. In my world at least, it's not the piece of cheap exploitation that some seem to take it but a howl of sheer disgust.

But I can see why people dislike it - and him.

I'd agree with this. I haven't read the Coconuts story, don't have it - but looking at those I've read - if Birkin's stories veer to the far side of good taste, so does most fiction which has something to say. Putting the boot into the reader is a justifiable way of making him sit up and pay attention.

[Johnlprobert]

I'm a big fan of Birkin's work. His stories are on the whole relentlessly bleak and unpleasant accounts of just how bloody stupid and nasty people can be. Robert Bloch often sugar-coated his bitterness at the human conditrion in his stories but Birkin never did. I first read 'Coconuts' a long time ago and I've never forgotten it. It's actually similar to the plot of an Honore de Balzac tale called 'El Verdugo' where an aristocratic family is to be excuted but the revolutionaries overthrowing the current ruling regime tell that that one member will be spared as a sign of mercy. They choose their youngest son, only for it to turn out that the little boy has to be their executioner. It's horrible in the same way and possesses, I think, the same artistic validity

[dem bones]

Yes, that's certainly the way I feel about Birkin's stories too. Even much of his 'fun' work reads like an E.C. comic strip with all the concluding panels removed, as if Charles has somehow 'forgotten' to give his villains their just desserts.

I like much of Bloch's work but I far prefer Birkin. His psycho's and sadists don't usually have an arrow pointing at their heads reading "Watch this one: he (or she)'s a violent maniac."

I'm sure I've read somewhere that El Verdugo was based on an actual war crime? I've never considered Balzac in connection with Birkin but I think you're spot on. That lover-hiding-in-the-Priest-hole classic usually translated as The Mysterious Mansion might almost be a role model for CB's darkest moments.

I note that for his Century's Best Horror Fiction, John Pelan selected Coconuts as his best for 1964. If and when the book sees the light of day I think this will only be the third time the story has been reprinted since its debut in Shafts Of Fear so hopefully it's destined to reach a wider audience. Like you, I've never been able to forget it.

[dem bones]

Just to cheer everyone up, another non-escapist horror from Shafts ... that really should be better known.

C. E. Montague - The First Blood Sweep: Hanney, little more than a kid, is new to the front line and reliant on the old lags to show him the ropes. On his very first day, he fortuitously escapes being blown to smithereens when an unexploded bomb he's examining changes its mind. As a result, his colleagues take a great interest in him and introduce him to their harmless little sweep-stake. They bet on the next of them to be killed. Word reaches Hanley that Sergeant Gort has drawn him in the lottery .....

In his introduction to A Century Of Horror, Wheatley writes of The First Blood Sweep: "It portrays, most vividly, the abnormal strain which clouded men's brains during the period of The Great War, and those of us who were there know that it paints a terribly real picture of life on the Western Front."

[paisleycravat]

Hello...

I saw a copy of Shafts of Fear in a second hand bookshop window down the road from me for £3 the other day. Being an incorrigible skinflint, I don't normally like to pay more than £2 at most for old horror anthos (I just worry I'll find them find a copy for cheaper elsewhere later on - I've got Quiver of Horror, which was a 50p car boot buy). Anyway, is this worth parting with the money for, do you think?

[dem bones]

Hi paisley. Well, as long as you aren't gonna break in and murder me in my bed when you hate everything about it, I'd say it would be £3 well spent, 'specially if you don't already have copies of the Birkin, Walpole, Montague, Burke, Hodgson and Coppard stories. I'm sure there are gems among the others, but it's been a while. Of the two, I prefer this to Quiver Of Horror by some distance, but then an endorsement from me can hardly be taken as a good reason to part with your cash . . .

[paisleycravat]

Well, I have hardly any of the stories in there and I did think it sounded more interesting than Quiver. Your recommendation has decided it for me. I shall march down to the bookshop tomorrow and demand that the elderly couple behind the counter give me their Shafts of Fear.

[vaughan]

and introduces Quiver of Horror - Tales of Strange Happenings.

Just picked up this short story collection. I'm sure someone had a cover scan of it. I'll come back later and list the contents if need be - it contains 14 short stories, one of them is by Wheatley.