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Post by allthingshorror on Dec 21, 2008 10:48:02 GMT
Digit 1955 - first UK publication. US edition of same year by Hanover House, New York
Robert Heinlein - They Fritzchen - Charles Beaumont Friz Leiber Jnr. - The Girl With The Hungry Eyes Robert Sheckley - The Fishing Season Ray Bradbury - The Crowd H. P. Lovecraft - HE Philip M. Fisher, Jnr. - The Strange Case of Lemuel Jenkins David Grinnell - The Rag Thing
What - no contents list? You mean to say I had to READ every story to find out what they were? No bad thing really, starting off with Heinleins meisterwerk, THEY, a story that I've read hundred's of times now - and the protagonist? Is he just a man in a mental institution with severe psychiatric problems - or could he really be God?
Fritzchen by Beaumont...it's rather...insane - Mr Pedlo is on the beach with his son, and his son Luther finds a thing that he calls Fritzchen. From the vague descriptions, it is clear to all that the thing isn't all animal which had a very strange cry - just like drowning kittens...They take it home, and with dreams of making big bucks - Mr Pedlo builds a cage for it, and stores it in the pet shop, where it feeds on some birds and a dalmatian pup, and its cries are getting louder and louder. Fritzchen wants its mummy...
The Girl with the Hungry Eyes, by Fritz Leiber is about a pin-up girl as psychic vampire. I think this one was turned into a Night Gallery episode? Can't be sure on that one.
Sheckley's The Fishing Season - As a sci-fi author, he can do no wrong, but here - even though the story in itself - a normal town, with every day normal people who start to go missing - on the whole reads well enough - the whole 'higher power' fishing for people ending didn't have me rising to the bait. Boom boom.
Bradbury's The Crowd. Best last line of any short story ever. Only a story I've read a handful of times, but one I'll be sure to visit much more often.
Lovecraft's HE - maybe I'm just not in the mood for Howard today, but my god, this story is just shite. It just seems that the more and more I read of him - I get this dread feeling that he might have been so far up his arse that he could tickle his cthulu mythos. Or I could have just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
Fischer's - The Strange Case of Lemuel Jenkins - first time I've read this or heard of the author, not overly impressed but still worth a cursory read.
And finally to Grinnell's The Rag Thing - which you just have to love. A blood and crap covered rag that starts to kill... GENIUS!!!
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 21, 2008 11:23:49 GMT
Love the eyes on the cover.
The Crowd is a big favourite of mine. Wasn't it filmed once in Twilight Zone? Fishing season I read yesterday. Well told, kind of obvious tale which didn't frighten. Sheckly can do much better,
Regarding Bradbury, Johnnie. When you get time remember to add to Your Pan site that I finally decided that The Emissary by Bradbury was my favourite Pan Horror. (I actually forgot it was in Pan Horror)
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Post by carolinec on Dec 21, 2008 12:07:13 GMT
The Crowd is a big favourite of mine. Wasn't it filmed once in Twilight Zone? Can't find it mentioned in my TZ (original TZ, including Night Gallery) books, and it doesn't ring a bell with me. What's the gist of the story? I might recognise it. Or could it have been in the Ray Bradbury Theater series?
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Post by carolinec on Dec 21, 2008 12:09:37 GMT
Or could it have been in the Ray Bradbury Theater series? Ah! Answering myself here! Is it the one where somebody collapses in the street, and there are always the same faces in the crowd when ever somebody collapses/dies - something like that anyway? If so, I'm pretty sure that was a Ray Bradbury Theater one.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 22, 2008 7:30:16 GMT
SPOILER
Yes Cc. It's an absolute classic. the basic premise is that every time someone has an accident in the street a crowd gathers around. Bradbury asked the question - where does that crowd come form. His answer - its made up of those who collapse and die.
The crowd never helps the person, only gets in the way aas they want the injured person dead. Eventually, he joins the crowd. Its a great story.
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Post by carolinec on Dec 22, 2008 11:24:33 GMT
Yes, that's the one! So does anybody know, did they do it as a Ray Bradbury Theater story? I've got a funny feeling it might have starred William Shatner ...
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Post by allthingshorror on Dec 22, 2008 11:48:28 GMT
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Post by carolinec on Dec 22, 2008 11:52:42 GMT
Thanks, Johnny - I should have thought to look on IMDB! D'oh!! I don't know how I got The Shat on the brain then? What a horrible thought ...
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Post by Johnlprobert on Dec 22, 2008 16:30:49 GMT
The Ray Bradbury Theatre one starring William Shatner is 'The Playground' with the mighty Shat surrounded by evil children at the end
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Post by carolinec on Dec 22, 2008 17:31:33 GMT
The Ray Bradbury Theatre one starring William Shatner is 'The Playground' with the mighty Shat surrounded by evil children at the end Yes! Now I do remember that one!
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Post by dem bones on Mar 1, 2011 21:50:52 GMT
Donald A. Wollheim (ed.) - More Terror In A Modern Vein (Digit, n.d.; originally Hanover House, USA, 1955) Arthur Holmes A. E. Coppard - Gone Away Venard McLoughlin - The Silence Donald A. Wollheim - Mimic Richard Matheson - Shipshape Home Robert Bloch - The Dream Makers Valery Brussof - The Republic Of The Southern Cross Robert A. W. Lowndes & John Michel - The InheritorsBlurb Here is a dose of "the mixture as before." Following close on the heels of our recent best-selling title Terror In A Modern Vein, in response to great public demand we are publishing a further spine-chilling selection of fantastic and bizarre tales - 'ghost stories' in keeping with modern times.Here's the second volume of the British reprint. If Wollheim's The Macabre Reader concentrates on weird horror fiction, Terror In A Modern Vein, leans more toward SF and general strangeness. To be honest, the best of this material is easily available elsewhere, but then you do without the cover art (Digit were brilliant at it). A. E. Coppard - Gone Away: John Lavenham, wife Mary and their grumpy friend Anson, three British tourists driving through the French countryside. After crossing the bridge of the hump-backed donkey, the three sink into an unaccountable depression. Everything has gone a bit weird. The speedometer has gone crazy - if it's to believed, they've covered thousands of miles since morning and it still shoots up even when they stop the car - and there appears to have been an earthquake up ahead. Eventually they reach a town Anson recognises. He steps out of the car to buy a paper and takes so long about it that Mary goes to look for him. It's the last John Lavenham sees of either of them. When he reports their disappearance, the Police chief locks him up and calls for a doctor as it's obvious John is obviously suffering from sunstroke. Much admired by Robert Aickman and August Derleth and it's not difficult to figure why. Donald A. Wollheim - Mimic: Nobody knows who the weird guy in the long coat is, just that he keeps himself to himself and seems inordinately afraid of women. New York has so many eccentrics that after a time he barely registers, and it's only after his death that the janitor learns just what's been living among them.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 2, 2011 18:27:16 GMT
Robert Bloch - The Dream Makers: A young reporter on Filmdom magazine tracks legendary director Jeffrey Franklin to the Restlawn Private Nursing Home in Hollywood. It's over twenty-five years since Franklin's final film bombed and neither he nor his talented cast and have worked since the arrival of the talkies. The journalist is expecting to find an embittered, broken old codger, but Jeffrey Franklin is genial, contented and seemingly hasn't aged a day in a quarter of a century. It is exactly the same with former matinee idol Walter Harland and everyone else involved in Franklin's career-destroying flop, Revolution: "Too-young faces, too-evasive answers, too-uniform a story. And that faraway look in their eyes." And why are they forever sneaking a glimpse up at the Heavens? Lured from his self-imposed exile by an offer to direct his own life-story, Franklin explains that essentially, we're all of us cast in a cosmic movie production scripted and directed by the Gods. As the vast majority are merely making up the numbers, we're left to our own devices, but the few stars have to stick rigidly to their scripts or beware the wrath of the cutter. My favourite bit occurs very early with Bloch reminiscing on a childhood visit to the cinema to see Lon Chaney in Phantom Of The Opera.
Richard Matheson - Shipshape Home: "I still didn't think that the janitor was anything but a harmless guy who had the misfortune to be born with a face that was strictly from Charles Addams." Reads like a companion piece to another of Matheson's amusing ultra-paranoid alien conspiracy shockers, Crickets. Ruth suspects that their janitor is some kind of fiend because he looks and sounds a little like Peter Lorre. Husband Rick, an author, diagnoses her problem as "reading too much science fiction" but even he has to admit it's kind of odd that the poor slob has kept his third eye a secret from them up 'til now. And how comes they landed a dream apartment like theirs for such a nominal rent? The answer lies, as it so often does, in the locked room beneath the cellar ...
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 3, 2011 14:05:16 GMT
Much admired by Robert Aickman and August Derleth and it's not difficult to figure why. Yes, it is very nice. What else should I read by Coppard? I have the Tartarus volume, but I do not feel like reading it cover to cover.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 3, 2011 18:53:57 GMT
i got along fine with Arabesque: A Mouse, Cheese and "Ahoy, Sailor Boy!" if that's any use to you, not quite so well with Old Martin and Adam And Eve And Pinch Me though in the case of these latter, this almost certainly had plenty to do me not being ready for them. i was a very impatient reader before this board helped me calm down. Clorinda Walks In Heaven, another famous one, has its admirers - Mike Ashley for one - but i remember it was too sickly sweet for then me (nice Clorinda dies a virgin, meets the lover she would have had in the afterlife). so ... to be on the safe side, try Arabesque: A Mouse next, JoJo and take it from there.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 3, 2011 20:23:38 GMT
Ok, thanks! Will report back later.
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