Instant Groff Conklin thread. thanks to Cauldron Brewer, whose synopsis of Margaret St. Clair's
Brenda rang some bells, but i couldn't remember where it had been reprinted.
Groff Conklin (ed) – Twisted (NEL 4 Square 1965)
An unholy bible of weird tales by fifteen masters of the supernaturalRay Bradbury – The Playground
George Langelaan – The Other Hand
David H. Keller – The Thing In The Cellar
Guy de Maupassant – The Diary Of A Madman
Stephen Crane – The Upturned Face
William W. Stewart – The Little Man Who Wasnt Quite
Will F. Jenkins – Night Drive
Walter M. Miller Jr. – The Song Of Marya
Stephen Grendon – Mrs Manifold
Ambrose Bierce – A Holy Terror
Eric Frank Russell – Impulse
Margaret St. Clair – Brenda
Edgar Allan Poe – The Tell-Tale Heart
H. P. Lovecraft – The Shunned House
Theodore Sturgeon – The World Well LostSome overspill with
In The Grip of Terror (Perma, 1951) as posted by
James Doig in
Latest Finds, which i've duplicated below for convenience sake.
This is what
Nightreader had to say about
TWISTED on Vault Mk I, Feb 18th, 2007.
‘The Playground’ - Ray Bradbury.
Grief. Paranoia. Fear of childhood. Widowed Charles Underhill would do anything to protect his young son Jim. To Underhill the Playground represents an evil arena where the children are violent and animalistic, and he’d do anything to save his son from suffering there. His well meaning sister Carol, who is helping him care for Jim, thinks the child needs to learn about life’s knocks with other kids. Then Charles meets a strange child at the Playground who makes him an offer he can’t refuse...
‘The Other Hand’ – George Langelaan.
Jean Claude complains to a doctor that his hand is not his own, that he wants it surgically removing. The doctor thinks him barmy obviously and sends him away. The rogue hand seems intent on causing as much havoc as possible for poor Jean Claude, from attempted murder to forgery the influence of the hand seems to be getting stronger. Jean Claude takes drastic action… In this very strange story there is no real explanation for what is happening to Jean Claude, nor does it explain the role of the wicked brother in law in his distress. I know that isn’t always appreciated but in this case I was left feeling a little cheated, as one character seems to shrug it all off by saying: “There are so many forces in nature and in us which we cannot yet understand… Forces which you classify as strange or surprising coincidences.”
‘The Upturned Face’ – Stephen Crane.
The face in question is that of a soldier shot dead on the battlefield. His fellow officers dig a shallow grave as bullets fly around them. And yet they’re squeamish about covering the upturned face with earth… Not sure what to make of this one. Can’t see the supernatural element in here, although some might argue the horror of war is bad enough.
‘Mrs. Manifold’ – Stephen Grendon.
Mr. Robinson becomes a registry clerk at The Sailor’s Rest Inn in Wapping. Not exactly a classy establishment but he needs the job. The proprietor is the large Mrs. Manifold who occupies the gabled room at the top of the Inn. She is most interested in seeing the register of guests on a weekly basis, as if she is looking for someone… I enjoyed this atmospheric and vividly described story, even if it’s not big on surprises.
‘Impulse’ - Eric Frank Russell.
A good pulpy story about Dr. Blaine, alone in his surgery one evening when a man arrives. The man turns out to be an animated corpse, possessed by sub microscopic thought reading aliens who crashed to Earth the night before. Their purpose is to find a new host body, the one they are using was already dead when they stole it, they want a living one. They need Dr. Blaine’s help because if they take over a conscious person they become instantly insane, they want the doctor to drug someone to make the possession smoother. Then into the surgery walks a young girl...
‘Brenda’ – Margaret St. Clair.
Brenda is an awkward girl living on Moss Island. One day while walking alone in the woods she smells an odour of rotting and decay. She soon finds the source of the stench, a man whose “skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky greyness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out from him…” Eventually overcoming her fear she develops a strange attraction to the man, perhaps identifying with his oddity and isolation from others.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Groff Conklin - In The Grip Of Terror (Perma, 1951)
Groff Conklin - Introduction
Maurice Level -The Last Kiss
Ray Bradbury - The Illustrated Man
Stephen Crane - The Upturned Face
Dorothy Sayers - The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey
EF Benson - The Horror Horn
Will F. Jenkins - Night Drive
HP Lovecraft - In the Vault
Guy de Maupassant - The Diary of a Madman
William Fryer Harvey - The Tool
Theodore Sturgeon - Bianca's Hands
Walter Owen - The Cross of Carl
Margaret St Clair - Hathor's Pets
Wilkie Collins - A Terribly Strange Bed
WW Jacobs - The Well
Samuel Blas - Revenge
Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum
Howard Wandrei - Macklin's Little Friend
Sak - The Easter Egg
H. L. Gold - Problem in Murder
H. G. Wells - The Moth
Ambrose Bierce - A Resumed Identity
Wilbur Daniel Steele - Bubbles-----------------------------------------------------------------
Groff Conklin (ed) - The Graveyard Reader (Ballantine, 1958)
Richard Powers
Ray Bradbury - The Screaming Woman
Ambrose Bierce - A Bottomless Grave
Richard Hughes - The Cart
Henry Kuttner - The Graveyard Rats
Roald Dahl - Skin
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - Night Court
Charles Beaumont - Free Dirt
Wallace West - Listen Children, Listen
John Collier - Special Delivery
Fitz-James O'Brien - The Child That Loved A Grave
H. P. Lovecraft - The Outsider
Theodore Sturgeon - The Graveyard ReaderOf all Richard Powers' Ballantine 'Chamber Of Horrors' covers this is my absolute favourite, and Groff has supplied a tidy selection of stories to compliment it, most of which have already been indifferently synopsised (sp? is there even such a word?) and commented upon
here-----------------------------------------------------------------
Groff Conklin & Lucy Conklin (eds.) - The Supernatural Reader; 27 Tales Of Uncanny Horror (Collier 1962: fifth edition 1966)
Don Ivan Punchatz
Herb Paul - The Angel With The Purple Hair
F. Marion Crawford - For The Blood Is The Life
Richard Hughes - The Stranger
Stephen Grendon - Mrs Manifold
A. E. Coppard - Piffingcap
Theodore Sturgeon - Shottle Bop
Saki - Gabriel-Ernest
Fitz-James O'Brien - The Lost Room
James S. Hart - The Traitor
Charles R. Tanner - Angus MacAuliff And The Gowden Tooch
Babette Rosmond & Leonard M. Lake - Are You Run Down, Tired
May Sinclair - The Nature Of The Evidence
Mary E. Counselman - The Tree's Wife
E. Nesbit - The Pavillion
Edgar Pangborn - Pick-Up For Olympus
H. F. Heard - The Swap
Ray Bradbury - The Tombing Day
Nigel Kneale - Minuke
John Collier - Bird Of Prey
David H. Keller - The Thing In The Cellar
Will Jenkins - Devil's Henchman
M. R. James - Lost Hearts
Lord Dunsany - Thirteen At Table
Philip Fisher - Lights
Harold Lawlor - The Silver Highway
Ambrose Bierce - The Moonlit Road
E. M. Forster - The Curate's FriendAnother decent mix of the well-known and the fairly obscure. Not all of the stories are 'horror' as I understand the term, some surely qualify as whimsical fantasy. James S. Hart's
The Traitor concerns a renegade vampire bumping off his own kind and his victims include Casanova! H. F. Heard is better known for
A Taste Of Honey, the novel that spawned Amicus shocker
The Deadly Bees .... and clever-bollocks here once disposed of a copy unread.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
'fraid i don't have the details for the wonderfully titled, ten story
BR-R-R-! (Avon, 1959), so if anybody could oblige. I know he edited some straight SF collections, but was Groff responsible for any more horror/ supernatural anthologies?
