|
Post by cauldronbrewer on May 11, 2012 13:55:26 GMT
It seems just as today's 'horror lite' brigade are the whipping boys and girls of the piece, back in 1971 commentators were bemoaning the trend toward what they perceived as "revolting" horror, "horror for its own sake, using a titillating mixture of sexual perversion and violence," and wondering at the morals and general disposition of those who could possibly enjoy same. Indeed, "if we were not careful", there might come a day when this unsavoury material would usurp the "real thing"! That's a view that goes back to Victorian times and the dreaded Penny Dreadful. The great thing about our genre is that there's ample room for both the coarse and the cultured - the bookends of a very long shelf. This idea has been on my mind given that I recently read Ramsey Campbell's The Far Reaches of Fear (a.k.a. Superhorror). The Vault's thread on the book includes much discussion of a passage in the introduction (not that I'm trying to reignite that debate!): Some horror anthologies have contained little more than monotonously gloating descriptions of human maltreatment and sadism. I believe this is pornography without sex - or rather, pornography whose label "horror fiction" the reader can use to reassure himself he isn't really perverse. The characters are incredible puppets: the writing is immature and unskilled - much as in most pornography. It may be healthier to supply such fiction than to force the reader to seek solace elsewhere. But it's presumptuous to claim that it's horror fiction. When I read that, my first though was of a passage written decades before by M. R. James: He [E. F. Benson] is however blameless in this aspect as compared with some Americans, who compile volumes called Not At Night and the like. These are merely nauseating, and it is very easy to be nauseating. I . . . could undertake to make a reader physically sick, if I chose to think and write in terms of the Grand Guignol . . . Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. When I first read the James quote, I rolled my eyes (in no small part because he's talking about some of my favorite writers) whereas I had a more sympathetic reaction to Campbell's line (because I take it to refer to a different set of writers). And yet one could argue that the two passages express the same fundamental idea. In the abstract, my bias is toward the cultured over the coarse. Then again, I find that I'd rather read a story by Joe Landsale (whose work is filled with over-the-top violence and vulgarity) than one by, say, Charles L. Grant. (whose philosophy of "quiet horror" I find intellectually appealing and whose writing is skillful but whose stories just don't resonate with me). In the end, I keep coming back to one of film critic Roger Ebert's favorite sayings: "'It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it" (he regularly gets complaints when he gives more stars to a "trash" movie than to a "serious" movie). I think that applies to horror as well. It even applies to Ebert's own reviews, with which I often disagree but which I almost always enjoy reading because he's such an entertaining writer.
|
|
|
Post by ramseycampbell on May 11, 2012 21:10:21 GMT
I don't think I would entirely agree with myself thirty-six years later or so. I certainly would never have dismissed Joe Lansdale, so perhaps I would just champion good writing, whatever its register.
|
|
|
Post by ramseycampbell on May 11, 2012 21:11:50 GMT
It's also obvious that I was making pornography a scapegoat.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 14, 2012 12:13:28 GMT
you wait all these years for an Eddy Bertin collection and two are gonna arrive at once? thank you, gents, for your responses to the question regarding whether or not there really is an unacceptable face of "horror" fiction. will possibly come back to this once i've got my head to go. In the meantime, the final pair from Female Of The Species, the first, influenced by an Algernon Blackwood story (i don't know which one), perhaps my favourite from a very strong selection. The Clump: Keith Tucker, obnoxious co-partner in a thriving real estate enterprise, takes wife Liz and son Danny on a Caribbean cruise, determined that only the boy will return home with him to America. When they arrive on the small island of St. Arthur, Danny asks if he can go explore a stretch of woodland, and his father, all psyched up to murder Liz, readily agrees. This does not go down well with a waiter who protests that the land is taboo. Fellow passenger Mr. Durnley, font of all West Indian lore, explains the laughable superstition connected to the clump, something to do with faceless child-ghosts in white Panama hats who lure infants to their deaths .... The Non-Descript: Originally published in the Davis-edited children's collection John Pertwee's Book Of Monsters as by 'Philip Welby', but credited to Richard on its reappearance in Jill Bennett's Skylark Ghost and Monster Stories (BCA, 1980). In the mid-nineteenth century, the Fosset Pool claimed the lives of both Dr. Creighton, eccentric traveller and naturalist, and his wealthy client, Mr. Thurston Bayliss, a collector of curios. Mystery surrounds their deaths as the Pool isn't especially deep and it would take considerable effort to drown there. Cut to the present day, and, when a meddling kid named Bob removes a heavy stone from the water's edge, he unwittingly releases the the Non-Descript, a monkey-merman hybrid with highly developed hypnotic powers and a misanthropic disposition. Can Bob's matey father save him before he's lured to a watery doom?
|
|
|
Post by piglingbland on May 23, 2012 11:25:29 GMT
|
|
|
Post by piglingbland on Jun 9, 2012 9:54:31 GMT
|
|
|
Post by piglingbland on Aug 6, 2012 8:51:47 GMT
Read Robert Morrish's excellent review, "Examining The Fairer Sex in Richard Davis's The Female of the Species", at twilightridge.net/blog/"The type of book that I love to see from small presses — a gathering of never-before-collected tales by an overlooked writer from decades past... Despite all the wonderful ancillary material, the main draw is obviously the fiction, and there’s a lot to like in that department, starting with the title story".
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Aug 6, 2012 14:05:59 GMT
Read Robert Morrish's excellent review, "Examining The Fairer Sex in Richard Davis's The Female of the Species", at twilightridge.net/blog/"The type of book that I love to see from small presses — a gathering of never-before-collected tales by an overlooked writer from decades past... Despite all the wonderful ancillary material, the main draw is obviously the fiction, and there’s a lot to like in that department, starting with the title story". I'd say Mr. Morrish's is the best take on Female Of The Species to date. He's likely right about The Inmate and the blatantly written-to-order A Nice Cut Off The Joint but this reader loved them both, Inmate in particular having a winning 'thirties pulp feel to it. I'd argue that A Nice Cut Off The Joint is relatively restrained given the subject matter, surely no more sensationalist than the admittedly, vastly superior Guy Fawkes Night? Female ... is a marvellous memorial. A collection of strong stories is what we're all there for, but it's the "wonderful ancillary material" supplies the finishing touch.
|
|
|
Post by piglingbland on Oct 4, 2012 7:36:24 GMT
A new review of The Female of the Species and Other Terror Tales, by Peter Tennant, has been published in the latest issue of Black Static magazine (# 30, Sep-Oct 2012).
|
|
|
Post by Swampirella on Mar 18, 2017 20:10:22 GMT
Richard Davis - The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales: Writers from the Shadows #1 (Shadow Publishing, April 2012) Caroline O'Neal Introduction by David A. Sutton
The Female of the Species Elsie and Agnes A Day Out The Lady by the Stream The Inmate A Nice Cut off the Joint Guy Fawkes Night The Time of Waiting The Sick Room The Clump The Nondescript
What We Were Looking for in Horror An Interview with Richard Davis Horror in Fiction BibliographyBlurb: STORIES OF TERROR & THE SUPERNATURAL
Jim's beautiful wife Viola is dead, but she had hidden a terrible secret... and now the cat he had brought home for her is behaving very strangely...
Mary and Johnny were hoping for a lovely weekend in the bed-and-breakfast by the sea, but there was something not quite right about their room... definitely not right at all!
Agnes was so annoying that her sister Elsie just had to kill her. But that was not the end of it, for Agnes has returned... or has she?
Richard Davis was the story editor for the BBC's LATE NIGHT HORROR series and the editor of the landmark THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, as well as many other horror anthologies, including the TANDEM HORROR, SPACE, SPECTRE and ARMADA SCI-FI series.
His short stories were widely published, but THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES is the first time his fiction has been collected in one volume.
The book also contains two rare essays by the author. Such a shame that Richard Davis didn't live to see his stories compiled, as this 230 page collection, celebrating his across-the-board contribution to terror fiction - he wasn't keen on "horror" - makes for the most worthy of tributes. Female Of The Species is an appropriate title if ever was. Deadly women, primarily sexually repressed spinsters of a certain age, predominate from the first. We meet Viola, a closet Black Magician, and Helen, the friendly neighbourhood cannibal. Elisabeth the cradle-snatcher and her ghastly mother. Mrs. Hayter, whose seething resentment unleashes a poltergeist on a seaside guest house. Elsie and Agnes bad case of sibling rivalry transcends the grave - or so it first appears. While the less said about Linda's attachment to husband Tom's pet gorilla .... By way of variation, The Nondescript sees a half-monkey half-merman wreak havoc on village pond-life. A Day Out is a deceptively gentle ghost story. And then there's the disappearance of a vicious country squire on Guy Fawkes Night. Strong as the stories are, it's the non-fiction material - Mr. Sutton's biography and bibliography, the two Davis essays, a Shadow interview from 1967 - give the book that bit extra. I also like how it throws up a mystery or two, namely "was Richard Davis 'Philip Buffy Welby'?" and which story did Davis reject outright for Late Night Horror on the grounds that it was set in a German Concentration Camp? You don't think Sir Charles Birkin had the audacity to send him ..... ? Some notes on the stories: The Female Of The Species: Told in diary form. Narrator Jim, a sales rep, rescues a ginger kitten from being trampled underfoot at Portobello Road Market. The kitten adopts him as its owner. Jim can't wait to show kitty off to his dear, devoted wife Viola when she returns from Oslo (typical of Vi, she's flown out to care for her useless brother Robin who has contracted pneumonia). But Viola doesn't make it back. She's incinerated when her plane crashes over the channel. It is only after the funeral can Jim bring himself to sort through Viola's things and that's when he makes the startling discovery that her "harmless" interest in books on witchcraft, black sorcery and the transmigration of souls was anything but. Maybe Robin is right to refer to his late sister as "evil" - it now seems abundantly clear that she'd lied to and cheated on Jim as a matter of course. The kitten, meanwhile, is getting kind of big ... The Lady By The Stream: Miss Elisabeth Wilson, who has spent her forty-six years skivvying for a manipulative invalid mother, develops an unhealthy interest in Tom Andrews, a beautiful and charming ten year old who's father owns the village sweet shop. When her mother learns that Elisabeth has been taking the boy on day trips to London, she warns that people will talk - and they certainly will if Mrs. Wilson has anything to do with it. For the first time in her life, Elisabeth, whose obsession with Tom is growing creepier by the day, defies the spiteful old harridan. The consequences are not for the faint hearted. A Nice Cut Off The Joint: Construction engineer Tom Simpson and Helen, his wife of ten years, have just returned to England from the Brazilian jungle, and Helen in particular is finding it hard to get used to the food. All that insipid frozen stuff everybody buys from the supermarket nowadays just doesn't do it for her. She had been the most promising medical student of her year, and, her flair for surgery came in handy on the Amazon when she saved the life of a tribal leader. As a reward, she was initiated into voodoo, which has left her a craving for raw meat .... The Sick Room: When her husband Albert is invalided out of the army, the embittered Elsie Hayter reluctantly opens a seaside guest house which she decorates after her own appalling taste. Right from the start there's a big problem with 'the Victorian Room'. First the painter slips and breaks his back, dying in hospital shortly afterward when complications set in. Then a young couple come to spend their first ever dirty weekend and it all turns boy butchering girl. The room acquires a dreadful reputation which, as Albert predicts, appeals to ghouls such as the recently divorced Mrs. Walsingham who rents it for herself and her cutesy little Pekingese. The dog rips out her throat. Can respected medium Mrs. Forrester rid the place of it's demonic presence? More to follow .... As expected, I quite enjoyed this collection. I think my favorite was the last one, "The Nondescript". Richard Davis must have seen a photo of at least one of these.....
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Mar 19, 2017 14:59:05 GMT
Wow. Never heard of Davis but the tales you so artfully annotate are quite enticing...
cheers, H.
|
|
|
Post by Swampirella on Mar 19, 2017 15:14:25 GMT
Wow. Never heard of Davis but the tales you so artfully annotate are quite enticing... cheers, H. I'm glad you think so; the "artful annotations" that you kindly refer to are by Dem rather than by me. Cheers in return, S.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Mar 19, 2017 16:41:16 GMT
Hope you get as much from Female Of The Species as I did, Scarlett. As mentioned, The "wonderful ancillary material" (David Sutton's intro, Richard's essay, the interview) rounds the book off just so. Have just made a start on the most recent Shadow publication, an absolute mammoth: The Spirit Of The Place & Other Strange Tales - the complete supernatural stories of Elizabeth Walter! Wow. Never heard of Davis cheers, H. Richard Davis edited several horror and SF anthologies including the early Year's Best Horror's; you'll find as complete a bibliography as we could muster HERE
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Sept 28, 2020 20:13:04 GMT
Is there any information in the foreword how Davis managed to sell this collection to Germany in 1977? It was published in the series Vampir Horror Roman paperback under the (eye-rolling) title "8 x Chocking fear". There was no foreword or such, Davis was an unknown writer. But in this regard this collection is not an oddity, the series had such diverse contributions as Richard Evans' Mind at Bay and Lionel Fanthorpe.
I realize that Davis only wrote a few stories so any collection would have the same material, still it seems to be a kind of mystery how this book came to be. I think in this regard it is truly one of a kind.
|
|
|
Post by Swampirella on Sept 28, 2020 21:17:38 GMT
Sorry, Andy, there's nothing in the foreword about any of the foreign-language editions.
|
|