sara
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 69
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Post by sara on Jun 19, 2011 21:34:43 GMT
that Awful Disclosures Of Maria Monk cover is the best yet! Oh, I don't know about that - the Pendennis cover looks especially tasteful!
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Post by dem bones on Jun 22, 2011 8:31:49 GMT
thank you my dear. you know Vault, always focused on raising standards. As a side note , artist Alan Hunter was quite a fixture on the fanzine art side back in the 1970's. I think he sadly died recently. I liked his individual take on things. KC Alan was a regular contributor to Ghosts & Scholars and i seem to remember his illustrations would also turn up in many a BFS publication. he had a big woodcut thing going on in his work, and the nun illustration, while not typical of his work, shows how effective he could be. like you, KC, i'm truly sorry to learn of his death.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 26, 2011 15:15:27 GMT
I figured William Fairlie Clarke would not be the only fringe member of the M. R. James gang to show up at our vicar and tarts party and sure enough:
M. P. Dare - A Nun's Tragedy: Dare is something of a Vault legend and this is among his very best M. R. James-gone-pulp extravaganzas. Cycling home from a day's visit to Bledburn Abbey, incorrigible antiquarians Gregory Wayne and Alan Granville chance on a ruined priory in Merringby Village and can't resist a quick explore. Unknown to them, the priory is haunted by a nun and her infant, walled up in the crypt on 28th August 1334. Happily for us, if not Wayne and Granville, tonight is the anniversary. Essentially it's the same story as The Poor Nun Of Burtisford, but Dare's so overdoes it in the "reek of putrescent flesh" department - he even gives the stinking wet mass a tentacle - you can't help but be impressed (that is unless you're among his legion detractors).
'Roger Pater' - De Profundis: the further adventures of the Holy Father Philip Roger Pater, the man who hears mystic voices. This time he's in Rome when an illicit cult builds around the late Mother Superior, Donna Anastasia Fulloni. Str. Fulloni was beloved by her convent but has been denied beatification following a deathbed confession in which she admitted to inventing all the spectacular 'visions' and 'ecstasies' she'd claimed to experience. Regardless of this, the nuns have dug up her bones and built a concealed shrine in the convent. Result: the soul of the undeservedly venerated, boastful nun suffers in purgatory. Alerted by her wailing ghost, Fr. Pater assists in mending the damage done by the foolish if well-meaning cultists. Another minor classic, but shouldn't be read directly after Dare's because it's quiet - it has even quite rightly been described as poignant - and A Nun's Tragedy blows it away.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 21, 2011 21:16:48 GMT
More fun with the sleazy strs. Know nothing about the above save it was one of a number of nunsploitation novels published by Star Distributors (NYC) as part of their Monks’ Secret Library (another was something called Behind The Convent Walls, 1977) Meanwhile, curiouser and curiouser, the faceless nun familiar from Armchair Thriller returns from the grave in the promo video for Garbage's Push It! she even has two evil twins along for the occasion.
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Post by rayocass on Jul 25, 2011 3:37:18 GMT
I wonder if BEHIND THE COVENANT WALLS (77) might be a novelisation (or reverse) of Walerian Borowczyk's film, BEHIND THE COVENANT WALLS (also 77), his artsy-sleazy take on the whole nunspolitation scene. (If you haven't seen a Boro flick, well, you're in for some surprises.)
Also: the most recent edition of "Best Horror of the Year" (III) edited by Ellen Datlow has an excellent story by Joe R. Lansdale called "The Folding Man" that involves an old car full of very evil nuns. It's an instant classic.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 23, 2012 13:49:59 GMT
Antonia Fraser - Quiet As A Nun (Orion, 2006: originally 1977) Blurb: I LIT THE CANDLE AND BEGAN GINGERLY TO CLIMB UP THE LADDER. THEN I HEARD A DISTINCT SOUND ABOVE MY HEAD. A SCRAPE ON THE FLOOR, AN IRREGULAR JARRING ON THE FLOOR ABOVE MY HEAD, LIKE SOMETHING ROCKING ...
A nun is dead - her emaciated corpse has been discovered locked in the tower of Blessed Eleanor's Convent. The tragic consequence of a neurotic young woman committing to a life of isolation and piety, the inquest concludes.
But this young woman held unusual power over the convent ... power she was planning to use.
Jemima Shore tries to keep her distance from the case, but when her lover cancels their holiday she finds herself reluctantly getting involved. A violent attack in the dead of night and another death convince her that the convent is not the haven of peace it appears to be. Suspicion and fear hang heavy in the air but how do you solve a murder no one will admit happened?
'A judicious mix of puzzle, excitement and terror' - P.D. JAMESSo, the rest of my tatty "collection" refuse to allow this one to sit alongside them on the shelf of shame, but in the end it simply came down to how badly I wanted to read Quiet As A Nun, and was I prepared to put up with a 'classy' modern edition (i.e, frightfully "tasteful" cover artwork) or hang on for the day when a proper, 'seventies Penguin turned up? At just the 183 pages, Antonia Fraser's novel is a do-able and on current form I'll have finished around Halloween. But will it prove even half as gripping as Julia Jones' creepy Armchair Thriller adaptation?
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Jan 23, 2012 17:51:17 GMT
A seemingly unlikely source of nasty nun shenanigan's is Penelope Fitzgerald's 1990 novel The Gate of Angels. It's not a horror novel, not remotely lurid (certainly not lurid enough for this thread), but is, instead - to quote The Times - a metaphysical novel which is entertaining, brief, and a love story. (It's also funny, charming and witty.)
What place does it have in the Vault? I hear you slaver - and if it's not you, then who is slavering at my shoulder? Well, it's set in Cambridge in the early 20th century, and one of the characters, Dr Matthews, is all too clearly M.R. James under an assumed identity. And in one chapter, entitled Dr Matthews' Ghost Story, he attempts to offer his theory concerning a local mystery by means of a spooky little tale, told in a very Jamesian manner.
The tale, a recollection from his youth, involves an archaeological dig at the site of the 13th century nunnery of the Sisters of the Seven Sorrows. A bishop's emissary had, in 1426, been despatched to evict the last of the order - There were only two very old women there who still wore the habit, though both were dirty and neglected, and a third who, though also old, was said to be of immoral life. The fate of the emissary remained a mystery, until one of the archeologists begins to see strange old women around the diggings at night, forcing something living into the culverts , chanting 'in, in', and then 'under'.
The chapter is short and creepy, and a brilliant Jamesian pastiche, and I'm glad of Ro Pardoe's James Gang list for leading me to the book.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 24, 2012 21:04:44 GMT
More work for the local library. Think you may just have provided the missing piece to the jigsaw with that recommendation, lurks. a little judicious cutting and pruning and seems there really is a decent supernatural horror anthology to be had from this subject.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 8, 2012 22:27:48 GMT
Maria Monk - Published by the booksellers, London (n.d.,) The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal.
Confirmation of Maria Monk's Disclosures.
The Nun, or Six Months' Residence In A Convent by Rebecca Theresa Reed, late inmate of the Ursuline Convent, Mount Benedict, Charlestown, Massachusetts."There is no doubt that, today, the likes of Maria Monk and Edith O' Gorman would be doing the rounds of Ophrah, Geraldo and other TV talk shows. Their tales of secret societies and subterranean rituals, lusty monks, pregnant nuns and murdered babies are the very stuff of a perennial public fascination." - Bob Rickard, Fortean Times #87, June 1996) Struck it lucky at Spitalfields market today with this veritable creepy nun omnibus for a £1. Both The Nun, or Six Months' Residence In A Convent (1835) and Maria Monk (1836) enjoy an enduring notoriety, privately circulated proofs of Rebecca Reed's best-selling hoax for allegedly inciting the Ursuline Convent Riots of August 1834 (on the basis of her fraudulent exposé, the local population burnt down the nunnery), Maria Monk's for providing a blue-print that would prove lucrative for 'Queen of Black Witches' Dorothy From Witchcraft To Christ: My True-Life Story Irvine and fellow purveyors of entirely ficticious non-fiction over a century later. All of which augers well for a supreme read-between-your-fingers experience, but can they deliver? Sarah's Senate edition still boasts the 'definitive' cover
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Post by andydecker on Mar 9, 2012 8:59:35 GMT
Maria Monk - what a great title Educate a foreigner. Here in Germany holy orders were commonplace, nearly a whole branch of my familiy were catholic and went into a convent in the 30s, 2 sisters and a brother. The whole programm. For life. Now as my information about England is only second-hand, as I understood it catholics had a hard time, it was even written into the constitution that no King is allowed to be of the catholic faith. Were there still a lot of catholic convents in the last century, despite being papist agents , or is this kind of nunsploitation more a cautionary and lurid tale of the creepy foreigners beyond the channel? Or are these Anglican convents?
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Post by dem bones on Mar 9, 2012 9:38:50 GMT
It's still a case that the King or Queen can't even marry a Catholic, far less be one themselves.
Maria Monk was, by all accounts, a troubled young lady, and there seems to be more than a hint of truth in suggestions that she was manipulated by Protestant clergy keen to capitalise on a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment sweeping the USA. It's not infeasible that the same parties selflessly offered their services as editors to make sure she remembered everything - the swinging priests, carnal nuns, gratuitous infant butchery - correctly.
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 9, 2012 9:42:38 GMT
Educate a foreigner. Here in Germany holy orders were commonplace, nearly a whole branch of my familiy were catholic and went into a convent in the 30s, 2 sisters and a brother. The whole programm. For life. Now as my information about England is only second-hand, as I understood it catholics had a hard time, it was even written into the constitution that no King is allowed to be of the catholic faith. Were there still a lot of catholic convents in the last century, despite being papist agents , or is this kind of nunsploitation more a cautionary and lurid tale of the creepy foreigners beyond the channel? Or are these Anglican convents? Catholics were having a very hard time of it up until the end of the 18th C., but then things started to change with a series of "Catholic Relief" and "Catholic Emancipation" Acts being passed by parliament to restore rights that they had been previously denied. By the mid-19th C. there was actually a big resurgence of British catholicism going on, including many high profile converts from Anglicism (e.g. John Henry Newman, Augustus Pugin, Gerard Manley Hopkins) that, with hindsight, can be seen as another aspect of a more general cultural movement that looked back to a sort of pre-Reformation medievalism as a better alternative to the "modern" - so at the same time there is the "Arts and Crafts" movement and the "Gothic revival" in architecture going on. From then on the numbers of Catholics in the country actually grew, largely because of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other "Catholic countries". There would have been (and still are) lots of convents in Britain when these stories were written.
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Post by andydecker on Mar 9, 2012 14:17:52 GMT
t's still a case that the King or Queen can't even marry a Catholic, far less be one themselves. Maria Monk was, by all accounts, a troubled young lady, and there seems to be more than a hint of truth in suggestions that she was manipulated by Protestant clergy keen to capitalise on a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment sweeping the USA. It's not infeasible that the same parties selflessly offered their services as editors to make sure she remembered everything - the swinging priests, carnal nuns, gratuitous infant butchery - correctly. Ah, like those "born-again" or whatever pornstars of the 80s touring the talkshows as posterchilds for the evil of porn. The more things change that, with hindsight, can be seen as another aspect of a more general cultural movement that looked back to a sort of pre-Reformation medievalism as a better alternative to the "modern" - so at the same time there is the "Arts and Crafts" movement and the "Gothic revival" in architecture going on. Thanks for the info, Doc! Arts and Craft, that would be William Morris and friends, right? I wonder if they had an inkling how long-lasting their ideas would be. Nuns are still creepy, even if their influence has waned. Still I find those nunsploitation mostly exhausting, you can try too hard to break taboos which are not so interesting in the first place. Of course I don´t care for religion so I am not part of the offended demography
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 9, 2012 14:35:41 GMT
Arts and Crafts, that would be William Morris and friends, right? That's right. Also, I just watched a BBC doc on the architect Augustus Pugin a few weeks ago - in keeping with the "Gothic revivalism" of his architecture, he also had a very "Gothic" ending (including a short spell in Bedlam) and died insane at the age of 40, possibly due to having contracted syphillis in his youth.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 6, 2014 18:21:17 GMT
Nothing remotely creepy about this Sister of Death. In fact - i think i'm in LUV John Betancourt & friends (eds.) - The Second Ghost Story Megapack (Wildside Press, 2013) © Thinkstock 'tis a pity that she's an e-book. Another cheap as chips Kindle-only selection from Wildside. For the record, contents as follows. Charles Dickens The Signal Man Lafcadio Hearn - The Soul Of The Great Bell Ambrose Bierce - Present At A Hanging M. R. James - Canon Alberic's Scrap Book Anatole France - the Mass Of Shadows E.F. Benson = The Man Who Went Too Far Ambrose Bierce - The Thing At Nolan Rudyard Kipling - the Phantom Rickshaw Brander Matthews - the rival Ghosts Vincent O’Sullivan - The Interval Guy De Maupassant - A Ghost Ambrose Bierce - A Cold Greeting Henry James - The Turn Of The Screw Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Shadows On The Wall Robert W. Chambers - The Messenger W. F. Harvey - The Beast With Five Fingers Fitz-James O’Brien - What Was It? Olivia Howard Dunbar - The Shell Of Sense Wilbur Daniel Steele - The Woman At Seven Brothers Myla Jo Closser - At The Gate Edgar Allan Poe - Ligeia Richard Le Gallienne - the Haunted Orchard Edith Wharton - Kerfol Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Wind In The Rose Bush Lafcadio Hearn - The Story Of Ming-Y
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