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Post by dem bones on Oct 20, 2007 9:19:12 GMT
Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg (eds.) - Best Horror & Supernatural Of The 19th Century (Beaufort, 1983) 
Washington Irving - The Adventure Of The German Student
Honore de Balzac - El Verdugo
Capt. Frederick Marryat - The Story Of The Greek Slave
William Mudford - The Iron Shroud
J. S. Le Fanu - Shalken The Painter
Edgar Allen Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart
Mrs. Gaskell - The Doom Of The Griffiths
Harriet Prescott Spofford - Circumstance
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam - Torture By Hope
Guy de Maupassant - The Diamond Necklace
Rudyard Kipling - The Strange Ride Of Morrowbie Jukes
Robert Louis Stevenson - Markheim
Anton Chekov - Sleepyhead
W. C. Morrow - His Unconquerable Enemy
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch - The Gravedigger's Daughter
Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge
Lorimer Stoddard - Vengeance
Kate Chopin - Desiree's Baby
Bram Stoker - The Squaw
Edwin L. Arnold - A Dreadful Night
Ralph Adams Cram - The Dead Valley
H. G. Wells - Pollock And The Porrah Man
Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle - The Story Of The Brazilian Cat
F. Marion Crawford - The Dead Smile
Robert Barr - A Game Of Chess The dust-jacket to this collection is so deathly dull that I can't think of any earthly reason why I should bother scanning it. Happily, the contents more than make up for this travesty, and amid the familiar stories are buried some gems I've yet to find elsewhere. It's been a few weeks since we had a blast of Victorian vileness on here, so I'll probably stick with this over the weekend before I return to the usual rubbish about infeasibly large spiders eating people. Normal service will be resumed when I realise that nobody is ever going to respond to this thread. Washington Irving - The Adventure Of The German Student: Paris. By the guillotine in the Place de Greve, Wolfgang meets a beautiful woman in black, a diamond-clasped collar her only outward show of prosperity. Wolfgang has dreamt of her for several nights without ever having laid eyes on her before now and he vows to protect her in this friendless and terrifying city. She spends the night in his bed and the sight that greets him next morning ensures that he lives out the rest of his days in a madhouse. Honore de Balzac - El Verdugo: Menda, Spain. Following an uprising against the French, the General sentences the noble Marques de Leganes and his entire family of a wife, three sons and two daughters to death. The Marques asks only that his eldest son Juanito be pardoned. The General, being of a sadistic bent agrees - on condition that Juanito acts as executioner to the others. A young French officer is in love with one of the daughters, Clara, who had saved his life the previous evening. She too will be pardoned if she agrees to marry him. Clara lays her head on the block ... Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch - The Gravedigger's Daughter: Following the latest bloodshed in the village, young Milena agrees to bury the casualties for her usual fee plus a bottle of brandy and (of course) a new fur coat. Among the corpses she recognises the local squire, "skinflint, robber of widows and orphans, slave-driver of peasants". She contemptuously lops off his head with her shovel. A far worse fate is in store for young Valerian, who betrayed her with another girl, on account of his not being quite dead when she buries him ... Harriet Prescott Spofford - Circumstance:"The compelling story of a young woman's attempt to fend off attack and prolong her life by lulling a hungry wildcat with song." Relax, it's far nastier than that. Her husband eventually arrives to shoot the beast but by the time they return to their homestead they find it burnt to the ground and their neighbours butchered in an in-jun attack! An eerie moment early in the tragedy as she makes her way through the forest: Walking rapidly now, and with her eyes wide-open, she distinctly saw in the air before her a winding sheet - cold, white and ghastly, waved by the likeness of four wan hands, while a voice, spectral and melancholy, sighed "The Lord have mercy on the people! The Lord have mercy on the people!" Three times the sheet with its corpse-covering outline waved beneath the pale hands, and the voice, awful in its solemn and mysterious depth, sighed "The Lord have mercy on the people!" Then all was gone, the place was clear again; she looked about her, shook her shoulder decidedly, and, pulling on her hood, went forward once more. Lorimer Stoddard - Vengeance: Native Americans attack a group of Settlers, burning a few buildings and running off with a little boy. His mother swears vengeance and fantasises about torturing a Redskin to death. When, twenty years later, the raiding party returns, she attacks one of their number with an axe, severing his arm at the wrist. "They'll cast him out to die!" she gloats as she displays the hand to her uneasy neighbours, a hand that bears a distinctive scar ... Villiers de L'Isle-Adam - Torture By Hope: Segovia. Having endured the torture chamber for a year and still not renounced his faith, Rabbi Aser Abarbanel is to be burned alive at tomorrow's auto de fe. No sooner has the Grand Inquisitor broken this cheering news and left his cell however, than the Rabbi realises his tormentor has forgotten to lock the door behind him ... Robert Barr - A Game Of Chess: ... on an enormous, electrified board. After his nephew is killed in a one-sided duel by the blackmailing journalist Schwikoff, Count Ferrand plots his ghastly vengeance. Schwikoff has either playing the game and taking his chances or being burnt to death ... Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge: Peyton Farquhar, a well-to-do Alabama planter, is about to be hung by the Yankees for plotting to sabotage the railway at the bridge. At the last moment, the rope snaps and he plunges into the river below, dodges a hail of bullets and swims to safety. He crosses a strange woodland and eventually finds his way back to his loving wife - or so it first appears. Bierce's masterpiece. Anton Chekov - Sleepyhead: Ill-treated by her master and mistress, the all but living dead skivvy Varka desperately needs to get some sleep, but they keep ordering her around. Now she has to rock the baby, that poor baby, that infernal baby that stands between her and a few hours shut-eye ... W. C. Morrow - His Unconquerable Enemy: Calcutta. Neranya is a loyal servant of the Rajah but prone to cruelty and outbursts of temper. When he fatally stabs a dwarf, the Rajah orders that his right arm be severed as punishment. Neranya despises him thereafter and plots to destroy him. First he butchers his only son, for which crime his legs are sliced off (he's already lost the second arm for an earlier misdemeanor). The quadruamputee is shoved in a cage ten feet off the floor in the Grand Hall where the Rajah can pop in for a quick gloat whenever he likes. That should keep the armless, legless one out of mischief! Shouldn't it ....? This collection is really very good. I haven't even got around to re-reading my favourite - The Iron Shroud: real Gothic torture chamber stuff with a killer ending - but the balance between the blindingly obvious choices and the truly obscure is just so. A real shocker finding a legit horror story from old Venus In Furs himself, Sacher-Masoch!
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Post by dem bones on Dec 7, 2010 12:11:44 GMT
might as well give this a boost as it's a bloody good selection and, besides I don't have to write up too many new notes.
Edwin L. Arnold - A Dreadful Night: "It was a damp, musty charnel house smell, sickly and wicked, with the breath of the slaughterpit in it - an aroma of blood and corruption."
Hunting stag in the Colorado mountains, our man falls through the earth, finds himself trapped in a pitch dark, steep-sided natural crypt. A human skeleton and the rotting remains of a bison attest that he's far from the first to have blundered into this trap, but the sheer dreadfulness of his plight strikes home when he lights the first of his two remaining matches.
More suspense-adventure than horror story, and for that we've to thank the interference of the narrator's "steadfast chum", Will bloody Hartland and his accursed tow-rope. Personally, i could also have done without the saintly animal rescue antics, too, but for all that, a very readable eight pages!
William Mudford - The Iron Shroud: Ghoulish Gothic classic sees Vivenzio - "the noble and the generous, the fearless in battle, the pride of Naples in her sunny hours of peace" - captured by Tolfi (a heartless bastard) and slowly done to death in a collapsing prison of fiendish design. Mudford's The Forsaken Of God is no bundle of laughs either, bless him.
Robert Louis Stevenson - Markheim: "He beheld a booth and a giant screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured. Brownrigg with her apprentice: The Mannings with their murdered guest, Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell: and a score besides of famous crimes ... He was once again that little boy: he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at those vile pictures ..." Christmas Day in London, and the gloomy, thirty-ish Markheim, visits a miserly old pawnbroker on the pretense of buying a present for a lady. After he's dashed the dealer's brains out, it's a simple matter of robbing the place - if only he can find where the money is hidden! - and getting the Hell out of there before the servant gets back from her date. But he's stalled a ghost, who looks a whole lot like Markheim and comes on like Satan, offering his assistance in return for the usual. Markheim argues that he's not an evil man, just another of life's losers driven to this vile crime out of sheer desperation. Meanwhile, the maid draws ever nearer to the shop "like a gallows" ...
Most authorities cite this psychological melodrama as a dry run for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, "an allegory for the duality of man", etc., and i think they are right. It's a page-turner and no mistake, but, as a horror story, if you ask me it could have done without that really queasy saccharine moment toward the end.
Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle - The Story Of The Brazilian Cat: Greylands, Clipton-On-The-Marshes, Suffolk. Amiable loafer Marshall King stands to gain a fortune and a title when his uncle, Lord Southerton, dies, but the old boy's proving to be a tenacious bastard so he's thinking of tapping up his wealthy cousin Everard who is not short of a few bob. Everard has just returned from Brazil with a wife and menagerie and is reputedly the most decent fellow on earth, so Marshall has little hesitation in accepting his invitation to stay with him in the country. Mrs. King proves to be a fly in the ointment, she's openly hostile to Marshall from the first, but Everard - he really is a lovely bloke - explains that this is just another example of her obsessive jealousy. To make up for her rudeness, Everard treats him to a meeting with his pride and joy, Tommy the Brazilian cat, a puma-like monstrosity who, should it ever develop a taste for humans, will become "the most absolutely treacherous and bloodthirsty creature upon earth". Thank goodness that Everard is such a wonderful fellow and not some psycho who'd lock you up with this beast to get his hands on Lord Southerton's inheritance, eh?
There are at least another two books in the series, a Best Science Fiction offering which i've not seen and (same boring cover as above, just it's in green)
ISAAC ASIMOV PRESENTS THE BEST FANTASY OF THE 19th CENTURY (Beaufort USA/ Robson UK, 1982)
Edited by Isaac Asimov,
Charles G. Waugh &
Martin Greenberg
Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Prosper Merimee - Federigo
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Dr. Heidegger's Experiment
Nikolai Gogol - The Overcoat
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Hans Christian Andersen - The Snow Queen
Edward Everett Hale - Hands Off
Leo Tolstoi - How Much Land Does a Man Need?
Oscar Wilde - The Canterville Ghost
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Lot No 249
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Bottle Imp
Frank Stockton - The Christmas Shadrach
Sir H. Rider Haggard - Black Heart And White Heart
H.G. Wells - The Man Who Could Work Miracles
Blurb:
A sequel to the acclaimed Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century, this new anthology offers the best and most unusual stories of fantasy. From Washington Irving's classic "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to H.G. Wells's "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," a unique selection is offered.
Also included are: Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," a story of lost youth regained; Leo Tolstoi's "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" in which a man realizes that his real estate needs only measure six feet deep; Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost," the delightful tale of a ghost with squatter's rights; and Hans Christian Andersen's classic, "The Snow Queen," among other notable selections.
In all, this international compilation is an intriguing and entertaining anthology of the finest writers of any century.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 7, 2010 12:51:55 GMT
RLS''s Markheim is a classy piece though.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Dec 7, 2010 16:29:09 GMT
That looks like a great book.
It could do with a better cover, though!
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Post by dem bones on Dec 7, 2010 21:58:39 GMT
That looks like a great book. It could do with a better cover, though! Got this really early on in my book-buying days, probably toward the close of the 'eighties, from a remainder shop (how I used to love them!) on the Charing Cross Road. Copies of Best Horror & Supernatural were stacked high, same with the companion Fantasy title, so guess they paid for running with such a dreary cover. But as introductions to Victorian terror go, this is class. The perhaps lesser known stories - Vengeance, Circumstance, etc. - are particularly welcome. Count Sacher-Masoch's three-pager, which I've not found elsewhere, takes his obsession with cruel, dominating women to it's logical conclusion. The Best Fantasy has plenty for fans of macabre fiction, too, albeit that the tone is usually gentler. Really must find time for a rematch with Rider-Haggard's voodoo novella which impressed me all those years ago. |
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Post by lemming13 on Dec 8, 2010 10:44:04 GMT
Really nice selection in both those books; I already have a lot of them, thanks to my fiendish device and the internet archives, but now I have even more for my list of items to track down. Thank you and curse you...  |
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Post by dem bones on Dec 8, 2010 12:23:34 GMT
Really nice selection in both those books; I already have a lot of them, thanks to my fiendish device and the internet archives, but now I have even more for my list of items to track down. Thank you and curse you...  nice illustration © the bride of demoniklemmy, you'll find the bulk of the less celebrated stories at horrormasters. And by way of small recompense for holding a Midsomer Murders Fan Club convention on your cult tv thread, here's a three-pager from Horror & Supernatural i've not been able to locate anywhere online. Meet lovely Milena, The Gravedigger's Daughter (see attached pdf.) meanwhile, can't believe this next, widely regarded to be Cram's masterpiece, doesn't seem to have attracted comment on here before now. Ralph Adams Cram - The Dead Valley: Eldenholm, Sweden. Young Olaf and Nils arrange to see a man in Hallsberg about a dog, which requires of them a trek through the wooded mountains. They reach their destination without incident, purchase the cuddly little pup and set off back home. By the time they reach the valley, however, night has fallen and a cold, phosphorescent mist creeps toward them. The dog drops down dead and both youths barely escape the clutching tendrils of fog. As it is, they each spend three weeks with a raging fever, after which Nils remembers nothing of their errand at Hallsberg and its aftermath, and suspects Olaf must be hallucinating. When fully recovered, Olaf returns to the mountains by day to discover the rotting carcass of the puppy on a ridge. The vast, oppressive valley is desolate but for one skeletal tree, and, on closer inspection he notes to his horror this ugly stump is surrounded by the bones of everything from the tiniest rodent to the mouldering skeleton of a man. Darkness falls. The eerie mist rises ... Attachments:
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Post by dem bones on Oct 18, 2015 10:51:27 GMT
Rudyard Kipling - The Strange Ride Of Morrowbie Jukes: Jukes, a very uncivil civil engineer, fever-stricken and tormented by endurance by a dog that won't quit barking, foolishly chases it into the desert and tumbles into a pit, horse and all. He is not alone. This is where outcast Hindu's - those who've suffered bouts of catalepsy and are therefore no longer considered alive - feast on crow and whatever tasty titbits might fall their way (so long, horsey). Eventually, one of the native chappies Jukes is forever disparaging lowers a rope and pulls the great white hunter to safety. Once beloved by compilers of 'Best Ghost Stories' anthologies. His horrible Mark Of The Beast is far more like it.
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