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Post by dem bones on Aug 9, 2010 8:39:28 GMT
Michel Parry (ed.) - The 6th Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories (Mayflower, 1977) Les Edwards Henry Kuttner – The Salem Horror Robert E. Howard – The Thing On The Roof Steven Utley – Someone Is Watching Hector Bolitho – Taureke’s Eyes Lewis Spence – The Horn Of Vapula Robert Bloch – The Mannikin John Collier – Thus I Refute Beelzy Arthur Porges – The Other Side Ramsey Campbell – The Seductress Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner) – Compliments Of The AuthorSteven Utley – Someone Is Watching: “Joe Laurel was his name, and voyeurism was his game.” Eight years into his career as friendly neighbourhood Peeping Tom and he’s never been caught. In that time Joe has accumulated a mass of information on the likes of “open-minded” swinger Mrs. Martha Baldwin who “had a keen sense of humour when it came to foodstuffs”. But this one reclusive girl intrigues him. She’s different, free of scandal and he think he’s fallen in love with her. Comes the night when she beckons him in and he suddenly realises she’s been aware of his prying all along … Ramsey Campbell – The Seductress: When Betty spurns Alastair after he’s show her his room (where he keeps a photo of her surrounded by Magickal paraphernalia), the youth hangs himself. His mother, Mrs. James – a far more adept Black Magician than her son – decides that Betty is to blame, and sets about a ghastly punishment. Betty is haunted by glimpses of a shadowy figure, and, though he’s a great comfort to her to begin with, the new man in her life, James, seems to have more of the night about him than was initially apparent. Arthur Porges – The Other Side: “What was the best way to finish him off? He dwelled with pleasure on certain peculiarly medieval tortures: so few people understood just what it meant to be drawn and quartered. Much more horrible than they dreamed …”Dr. Irwin Craig makes use of a medieval black magic parchment to destroy his enemy, Prof. Walter Randall whose meteoric rise to the chairmanship of the Humanities Division at Midwestern Uni rankles. Worse, Randall’s latest paper effortlessly anihilates Craig’s life work History Of The First Crusade. Oh, is he gonna suffer! Utilizing a photo of his enemy stuck to a cardboard effigy, Craig devises a series of exquisite torments for Randall to endure before he finally kills him but he’s distracted by a piece on Miss Universe in the newspaper. Phwoar! He fancies a piece of her! So he sets to work with his scissors and places a love-spell. Sadly, he neglects to check the report on the other side of the page … Robert Bloch – The Mannikin: Simon Maylore is born with the beginnings of a twin growing out of his back. As he attains manhood, so the hump becomes more pronounced – it has grown a head, torso and arms: it can even speak (“More blood, Simon. I want more.”) The vampiric growth achieves domination over its host and Simon is manipulated into performing black magic rituals. The growth is intent on raising the Elder Gods versus mankind. John Collier – Thus I Refute Beelzy: Small Simon Carter, six, worryingly pale and permanently transfixed won’t mix with the other boys, preferring to spend the holiday holed up in the beat-up summer house where he plays with his friend Mr. Beelzy. His father, a dentist, insists that Mrs. Carter and Small Simon refer to him as Big Simon at all times because he’s a smug, overbearing git of the first order. We join him as he’s bullying Small Simon into admitting that Mr. Beelzy is a figment of his imagination but the boy is proving uncharacteristically stubborn so now Big Simon is going to beat him. Even the threat of this doesn’t faze the poor kid as Mr. Beelzy has promised that he won’t allow anyone to harm him. What do you reckon? Robert E. Howard - The Thing On The Roof: Despite their mutual dislike, the narrator helps Tussmann procure a copy of Von Junzt's Nameless Cults - the original, mind; not the cheapskate Bridewall pirate (London, 1845) nor the abridged albeit lavish Golden Goblin Press reprint (New York, 1909). Howard (or whoever) comes up with the goods, Tussman is ecstatic - Von Juntz confirms his suspicion that the subterranean chamber he chanced upon on a recent South American excursion is the mythical Temple of the Toad! Here the pre-Indians worshipped "a huge, tittering, tentacled, hoofed monstrosity" and if Tussman can gain access to the crypt, he will find a mummy with a jewelled key around its neck - a key that will give him access to "treasure"! Fatally, in his impatience to get started on the tomb-looting, Tussmann only skim-reads the passages pertaining to the Toad God and this proves his undoing. On his return from Honduras to his Sussex Estate he is accompanied by something as lethal as it is hideous ....
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Post by dem bones on Aug 10, 2010 10:38:22 GMT
Hector Bolitho - Taureke's Eye: What caused the brilliant young Maori medical student Hongi Taureke to commit suicide at Edinburgh University by swallowing handfuls of glass eyes? Atavism. He is the descendant of a proud chieftain who resisted the Missionaries and ate the eyes of a boorish English trader who insulted his people. The dead man, it seems, considers it a sell out for Hongi to be making it in the white man's world. From Bothilo's 14-story collection The House in Half Moon Street and Other Stories (Cobden-Sanderson 1935). Have never seen a copy of but, from what little I've encountered of his work, it may well be worth the seeking out. Other than the fact the book change hands for a tidy sum, the snag for some of us is that it doesn't seem to be horror & supernatural exclusive, so if you can find elsewhere the title story, The Albatross, The Boy Who Was Mad, Taureke's Eyes and what sounds like a class devil worship-human sacrifice offering, The Crying Gate, you've likely covered it. The House in Half Moon Street is reprinted in Hugh Walpole's A Second Century of Creepy Stories (Hutchinson, 1937) and The Albatross made The Evening Standard Book Of Strange Stories (Hutchinson, n.d.) Had a good time with Taureke's Eye but this next was even more up my street. Lewis Spence - The Horn Of Vapula: Frain is in Ebberswale researching the folklore of the moorlands. He's having a tough time of it from the superstitious, taciturn villagers, but one night, as he passes the district's solitary landmark - its Norman Church - he spots a hulking figure crawling across the roof. Suspecting a burglar, he shouts a warning whereupon the figure lifts itself upright - it's very skinny - and deliberately throws itself over the edge. Frain, distraught, rushes to the churchyard, but ... no crushed and broken corpse! Frain returns to his cottage intent on raising a search party, grows uneasy as it soon becomes clear to him that he's being followed by something as yet unseen. A growl and a peal of horrible laughter sends him sprinting to his door. Once inside, he gets his first glimpse of the creature's demonic, leering face when it flashes it's fangs at him through the window. He beats it off with a heavy stick. Frain approaches the Reverend Edward North about his experience but finds him as hostile and boring as his parishioners, so he telegrams his friend, anthropologist Martin Radcliffe, for assistance. Together the men watch in awe as a hideous gargoyle - the image of Frain's demon - detaches itself from the roof, climbs down the wall and heads across the field to ... a cowshed (!). They sneak in just in time to watch it applying its huge black lips to the throat of a calf .... Spence (1874-1955) compiled the weighs-a-ton (and, for this reader, sometimes impenetrable) An Encyclopedia of Occultism (Routledge, 1930: Bracken, 1988 [as The Encyclopedia of The Occult]; Dover, 2003) and wrote a number of shorts, my favourite of which is the magnificently titled Lucifer Over London (inspiration for The Fall's Lucifer Over Lancashire?) as included in Peter Haining's The Magicians. Richard Dalby & Rosemary Pardoe reprinted The Horn Of Vapula in their Ghosts & Scholars anthology and Dalby, clearly a fan, revived his A Voice In Feathers for Mammoth Book Of Ghost Stories 2, even naming a collection after his The Sorceress In Stained Glass. His stories washed over a younger me but think I could develop a liking for this guy.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 10, 2010 18:30:34 GMT
A forty pager from Unknown (Oct 1942) and so busy, i'm best to do it in two hits ('specially as i haven't finished it yet)
Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore ) – Compliments Of The Author: Sam Tracy, a reporter on The Journal. has a lucrative sideline - blackmail. Tonight's target is Baldwin Gwinn, Magician, and murderer of Ima Phairson. Tracy is prepared to trash his evidence and keep a still tongue if Gwinn is willing to part with a paltry $5, 000.
Tracy arrives at Gwinn's place up in the Hollywood Hills and is met in the driveway by a talking cat with luminous green eyes who warns him to get lost if he knows what's good for him. The reporter puts that one down to ventriloquism this Gwinn is a cheap fraud and no mistake! When Tracy presents his incriminating photostats, Gwinn doesn't even bother to deny his allegations. But he can't pay up, quite simply because it is against a clause in his Satanic pact to give in to blackmailers. To be rid of his odious guest Gwinn fashions a wax doll out of thin air and lobs it in the fireplace. It doesn't work because Tracy doesn't believe in voodoo. The Magician has more success when he manifests the very solid looking phantom of Andy Monk, executed two years earlier as the result of a Tracy Journal exposé. With the violent Monk bearing down on him, Tracy panics, fires his pistol, the bullet passes through the ghost and takes off the top of Gwinn's head. The killer grabs the dead man's notebook and rushes from the scene. Once again he meets the cat, the late 'Baldy's familiar, who warns him that retribution will be terrible. "I'm a particularly nasty sort of familiar ... You won't get in any trouble with the police. But you'll get into trouble with me - and my friends. It'll be harder since you've got the book, but I'll manage."
The book. Tracy is curious why it seemed so important to Gwinn. First thing he notices is, it no longer bears the dead man's name on the cover but his own. But it's filled with gibberish, clipped entries like "Werewolves can't climb oak trees", "Don't speak till you're back on earth", "25" and "Try the windshield".
Tracy drives away fast from the scene of the crime. A huge tree seems to take on the face of a toothless crone and he crashes his coupé off the road. With the reporter trapped inside, it catches fire. "Try the windshield".
He does, and escapes seconds before the gas tank explodes ....
To be continued ...
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Post by monker on Aug 11, 2010 2:29:37 GMT
Gord - if your summery of The Horn...is anything to go by, I may have to track that mayflower down.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 11, 2010 5:45:20 GMT
Gord - if your summery of The Horn...is anything to go by, I may have to track that mayflower down. As mentioned, it's also available in the Dalby & Pardoe edited Ghosts And Scholars where the editors note in their introduction: "He also contributed many fine occult stories to The Grand and other magazines in the 1920's, later collected in The Archer In The Arras (Grant & Murray, 1932). Some of them are submerged beneath an overdose of Scottish dialect, but of the others The Horn Of Vapula is one of his best stories, and the most Jamesian." Looking at those dates, my first thought was to consider it for the Wordsworth recommendations, but Spence's longevity (1874-1955) means we'll have to wait 15 years before its public domain. Also of interest perhaps; his non-fiction Occult Causes Of The Present War (Rider & Co, 1940: Kessinger, 1997) is reputedly the first book to out the Nazi hierarchy as a bunch of Satanists. Finally, I think Rosemary 'Mary Ann Allen' Pardoe's super The Cambridge Beast may have been written as a tribute to The Horn Of VapulaLater: Dear Mr. Tracy
By this time, you may already have discovered the peculiar qualities of this grimoire. Its powers are limited, and only ten page references are allotted to each owner. Use them with discriminationConcluded 'Lewis Padgett's Compliments Of The Author which, after the promising beginning settles into a routine fun battle of wits between man and demonic cat. The cat, a typical Kuttner wise-ass who goes by the name is Meg, sics a driad, salamander and a twin-headed, spider-legged monstrosity against Tracy, all to no avail: he's a fast learner and realises the book is never wrong, its just a question of correctly interpreting the cryptic advice. But you will have already guessed who eventually comes out on top and you are not wrong. An entirely predictable ending doesn't help matters.
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Post by monker on Aug 15, 2010 7:19:08 GMT
Just read 'House on Half-Moon Street' - classic! I wonder if it owes a bit to a certain Henry James story, though? If Bolitho can get that out of what may have have come across as mundane in lesser hands then I'm optimistic about the rest of his handful of 'weirds'. ' Not a fan of 'tribal horror' type stories, generally, so I'll put 'Taureke's Eye' on hold.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Dec 6, 2016 15:11:04 GMT
Gord - if your summery of The Horn...is anything to go by, I may have to track that mayflower down. As mentioned, it's also available in the Dalby & Pardoe edited Ghosts And Scholars where the editors note in their introduction: "He also contributed many fine occult stories to The Grand and other magazines in the 1920's, later collected in The Archer In The Arras (Grant & Murray, 1932). Some of them are submerged beneath an overdose of Scottish dialect, but of the others The Horn Of Vapula is one of his best stories, and the most Jamesian." The Archer In The Arras has a very striking (chiaroscuro?) cover. Has anyone read it?
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 6, 2016 16:00:13 GMT
Gord - if your summery of The Horn...is anything to go by, I may have to track that mayflower down. Me too!
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Post by bobby on Dec 7, 2016 0:59:47 GMT
Robert Bloch – The Mannikin: Simon Maylore is born with the beginnings of a twin growing out of his back. As he attains manhood, so the hump becomes more pronounced – it has grown a head, torso and arms: it can even speak (“More blood, Simon. I want more.”) The vampiric growth achieves domination over its host and Simon is manipulated into performing black magic rituals. The growth is intent on raising the Elder Gods versus mankind. John Collier – Thus I Refute Beelzy: Small Simon Carter, six, worryingly pale and permanently transfixed won’t mix with the other boys, preferring to spend the holiday holed up in the beat-up summer house where he plays with his friend Mr. Beelzy. His father, a dentist, insists that Mrs. Carter and Small Simon refer to him as Big Simon at all times because he’s a smug, overbearing git of the first order. We join him as he’s bullying Small Simon into admitting that Mr. Beelzy is a figment of his imagination but the boy is proving uncharacteristically stubborn so now Big Simon is going to beat him. Even the threat of this doesn’t faze the poor kid as Mr. Beelzy has promised that he won’t allow anyone to harm him. What do you reckon? "The Mannikin" was the source material for "The Hunchback!" in Haunt of Fear #4. "Thus I Refute Beelzy" was adapted twice by EC (both of them "unauthorized"), as "Horror in the School Room" in Haunt of Fear #7, then as "Grounds...For Horror!" in Tales from the Crypt #29.
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Post by mrhappy on Dec 7, 2016 3:24:10 GMT
As mentioned, it's also available in the Dalby & Pardoe edited Ghosts And Scholars where the editors note in their introduction: "He also contributed many fine occult stories to The Grand and other magazines in the 1920's, later collected in The Archer In The Arras (Grant & Murray, 1932). Some of them are submerged beneath an overdose of Scottish dialect, but of the others The Horn Of Vapula is one of his best stories, and the most Jamesian." The Archer In The Arras has a very striking (chiaroscuro?) cover. Has anyone read it? View AttachmentI have read it and it is well worth seeking out. Unfortunately, copies are very expensive and only three of the twenty-two stories have been anthologized. All except three or four of the stories are supernatural. E.F. Bleiler was not overly impressed - his typically matter-of-fact summation was that some of the folkloristic snippets were interesting but some of the stories should not have been published. While I usually admire Bleiler's opinion, I think he was a little harsh in regard to this collection. Spence had a knack for writing deliciously creepy passages. Take this from the story 'The Hudart' where our protagonist, while walking past an open door, glimpses a child dancing by lamplight: "The shadow, yes, it was a funny shadow too! Lord, what was it? The breath in my throat seemed to become solid as I looked at it. It was not the child's, but the silhouette of something monstorous, something that danced and leapt in time with her, something that waved huge wings and flourished a fanlike tail, a shape beaked and with hooded head. I shook myself slightly and stared. I might not call her. I was frozen on that step. Still she danced and capered, and the shadow capered with her." Spence is very underanthologized with only five stories (three of which appear here) appearing in various Peter Haining or Richard Dalby anthologies. A new edition of Archers in the Arras with a few extra stories would be a welcome edition. Mr. Happy
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Post by mrhappy on Dec 7, 2016 3:47:37 GMT
Also, the comment about some stories being buried under dialect is spot on.
Mr Happy
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Post by Michael Connolly on Dec 7, 2016 13:42:06 GMT
The Archer In The Arras has a very striking (chiaroscuro?) cover. Has anyone read it? I have read it and it is well worth seeking out. Unfortunately, copies are very expensive and only three of the twenty-two stories have been anthologized. All except three or four of the stories are supernatural. E.F. Bleiler was not overly impressed - his typically matter-of-fact summation was that some of the folkloristic snippets were interesting but some of the stories should not have been published. While I usually admire Bleiler's opinion, I think he was a little harsh in regard to this collection. Spence had a knack for writing deliciously creepy passages. Take this from the story 'The Hudart' where our protagonist, while walking past an open door, glimpses a child dancing by lamplight: "The shadow, yes, it was a funny shadow too! Lord, what was it? The breath in my throat seemed to become solid as I looked at it. It was not the child's, but the silhouette of something monstorous, something that danced and leapt in time with her, something that waved huge wings and flourished a fanlike tail, a shape beaked and with hooded head. I shook myself slightly and stared. I might not call her. I was frozen on that step. Still she danced and capered, and the shadow capered with her." Spence is very underanthologized with only five stories (three of which appear here) appearing in various Peter Haining or Richard Dalby anthologies. A new edition of Archers in the Arras with a few extra stories would be a welcome edition. Mr. Happy I'm surprised that Spence's "The Sorceress in Stained Glass" has only been collected once, in Richard Dalby's 1971 anthology of the same name. The whole book could stand a reprint.
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Post by jamesdoig on Dec 8, 2016 21:22:47 GMT
A new edition of Archers in the Arras with a few extra stories would be a welcome edition. Sounds like one for Valancourt, Mr H.
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Post by ropardoe on Dec 9, 2016 10:19:32 GMT
A new edition of Archers in the Arras with a few extra stories would be a welcome edition. Sounds like one for Valancourt, Mr H. That's a good idea. I suspect there may be a good reason why no one has reprinted the book - a reason related to the dialect stories, which sound awful. "The Horn of Vapula" is excellent though. The smart but quite cheap books which Valancourt produce would seem the correct route - that way people won't feel hard done by if they find some of the tales unreadable.
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Post by helrunar on Apr 19, 2017 1:08:39 GMT
This one (the 6th Mayflower Black Magic) sounds like a laugh riot. Adding it to my list.
Fab thread! I've browsed a reprint of Lewis Spence's book (a compilation really) on Faery lore of the British Isles but have yet to purchase. As a teenager I owned the anthology Sorceress in Stained Glass... edited by Mr. R. Dalby? The book alas long ago was lost in the mists of antiquity (most likely in the 1980s when I was moving around a lot).
cheers, H.
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