Fruit & Veg hate you ..... its ...

[dem bones]

...... Asparagus Now!

Jonathan Field

H. P. Lovecraft - The Colour Out Of Space: (Amazing Stories, Sept. 1927: August Derleth [ed.] The Night Side, 1947).

Charles Birkin - Green Fingers: (The Smell Of Evil, 1965). Not A bundle of laughs, to be honest.

Dorothy L. Cooke - The Parasite: (Robert A. W. Londres [ed], Startling Mystery Stories 14, Winter 1969).

Ray Bradbury - Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!: (Machineries Of Joy, 1972).

Gaylord Sabatini - Vortex Of Horror: (Herbert Van Thal [ed.], 14th Pan Book Of Horror Stories, 1973). Mostly concerned with plants, but am almost sure I spotted some giant vegetables in there.

Michael Bishop - Rogue Tomato: (New Dimensions # 5, April 1975: Robert Adams, Martin Greenberg & Pamela Crippen Adams [eds.], Hunger For Horror, 1988). 'Philip K.' wakes to find he's turned into a tomato the exact size and colour of the planet Mars ....

Dorothy Kilmurry-Hall - Bert's Resurrection: (!1th Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories, 1978).

M. S. Goodall - Banana Revenge: (Spinechilling Tales For The Dead Of Night, 1986). A borderline case in that the banana involved is insentient and merely the instrument of the young Algerian's revenge.

Brian Lumley - Fruiting Bodies: (Weird Tales, Summer 1988: Paul Kane & Marie O'Regan [eds], Body Horror,2012).

Ramsey Campbell - Apples: (Alan Ryan [ed.], Halloween Horrors, 1988).

Bill Pronzini - Pumpkin: (Alan Ryan [ed.], Halloween Horrors, 1988).

James Stanger - Pith: (Rog Pile [ed.], Filthy Creations 2, 2007). Last remnant of an orange has all the fun at Christmas.

Mick Lewis – Gnomes: (Charles Black [ed.], Sixth Black Book Of Horror, 2010). The perils of watching 'Shrooms on hallucinogenics.

Simon Clark – The Rhubarb Festival: (Terror Tales Of Yorkshire, 2014).

Franklin Marsh - Night Of The Pumpkins: (Auld Franklin's Almanack Of Doom, 2015). First few hours of the uprising ....

Franklin Marsh - Day Of The Pumpkins: (Auld Franklin's Almanack Of Doom, 2015). ... the rhubarb joins in and it's sheer total Armageddon.

Thanks to Justin for providing the lovely illustration!

[Shrink Proof]

A good crop there, Dem.

I'd add "The Fertilizer Man" by Mark Morris, which features in Nicholas Royle's "Darklands" anthology. Very creepy...

[bobby]

    The EC story "Ear Today...Gone Tomorrow!" in Haunt of Fear #11 has the two owners of a fertilizer company raiding a graveyard for bone meal so they can fill a large order. Later in the story their car breaks down and they walk through a cornfield, not knowing it had been fertilized with that batch of their fertilizer. The cornstalks come to life and flog the men to death.

[dem bones]

You wait ten years for that crummy House On The Borderland cover ....

Some potential crossover with the Plants Hate You! Omnibus, a case in point being Robert Graves' Earth To Earth, in that Elsie and Roland Hedges' medium-paced reign of terror originates from their sampling compost guru Dr. Steinpilz's organic potatoes. Once converted to his methods, there's no turning back.

[dem bones]

This one will chill you to the marrow ....

Attachments:

damon knight eripmav.pdf (28.07 KB)

[cauldronbrewer]

Apr 25, 2018 20:48:25 GMT dem bones said:

This one will chill you to the marrow ....

It's up there (down there?) with Fredric Brown's "Blood."

[dem bones]

Another tiny terror:

Kent Patterson - The Wereyam: (Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1994). The horror in bioengineer Bill Mauer's greenhouse - coming soon to fruit & veg market near you.

[dem bones]

"Trees, plants, vegetables had mysteriously developed will power of their own, had cast off the dominance of man."

W. H. Silvey

Donald Wandrei - Strange Harvest: (Weird Tales, May 1953). A whole orchard moved itself to a new location; potatoes sank instead of being dug up; melons receded from the pickers - what sort of agricultural report would cover all this?

An orchard uproots and pelts farmers with apples: Old Emily Tawber is assaulted by melons; twenty acres of wailing wheat-grain attack a harvester; potatoes resist the digger. Agriculture agent, Dan Crowley's investigation of the strange events in Shawtuck County lead him to the home of botanist Green Jones, whose experiments with a radiation ray have gone proved more successful than anticipated.

[dem bones]

Edward Lee - Night of the Vegetables: (Martin H. Greenberg [ed] White House Horrors, DAW, 1996). A nuclear melt down in P'Tang, North Korea. Gale force winds dump radioactive dust over North America with the result that a vast quantity of the US population West of the Rockies mutate into vegetables. Robby's hot date with Karen and her wonderful 36c's sours when she turns into a carrot. A little girl wakes up a lettuce. All this on the day the most sweary President in history is diagnosed with a truly breathtaking dose of crabs. Talk about "It never rains, it pours"!

Pop culture references. A triple-header at the drive in: Three on a Meathook, Barn of the Naked Dead, and Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town. "Before the first flick, James Woods came on, warning America's youth about the evils of cocaine."

[dem bones]

Vegetable Man where are you?

Fortean Times #111, June 1998: originally Standard-Examiner 1 March 1988.
Metro, 9 Feb. 2021.

Bernard Taylor - Green Fingers: (London Evening News, 8 March 1975, as In the Garden of Evil; This is Midnight, 2017). Strange tale of rich, fit as a fiddle, will-the-old-bat-never-die Aunt Ada, grasping nephew 'Tom Tom,' and the Cos lettuce patch of doom.

John Llewellyn Probert - The Giant Tropical Fresh Fruit Invasion of Old London Town: (Sarah Dobbs [ed.] Scifantastic #4, Easter 2006). Perhaps his Lordship might wish to shed some light on this early effort? Then again, perhaps he might not.

[helrunar]

Thanks for the hilarious clippings! 

There was a brilliant Night Gallery segment called "Green Fingers," adapted by Rod Serling from a story by one R. C. Cook. Elsa Lanchester was marvelous in it--one of her finest performances, I thought.

cheers, Hel.

[Shrink Proof]

Feb 1, 2022 10:42:54 GMT dem bones said:

Vegetable Man where are you?

Right here...

[dem bones]

SOME SEASONABLE GHOST STORIES.
HAUNTED HOUSE WANTED.

Do vegetables have ghosts?

This was the uncomfortable suggestion made by Mr. Elliott O'Donnell in a lecture on haunted houses given on Wednesday at the Eustace Miles Restaurant.

My hair lifted crisply from the roots (writes a "Daily Chronicle" representative who was present) as I gazed timidly around the darkened room. Here we were in a notorious food reform restaurant, where hundreds of innocent vegetables are done to death daily. Who could tell what unquiet spirits from the kitchen garden might be hovering around? A colleague, who is strong-minded and fearless in Fleet-street, started when I passed him a cigar, thinking in the gloom that a murdered head of asparagus had him in a ghostly clutch.

A cheerful little request was made by Mr. O'Donnell at the beginning of his lecture. He wants a few people to join him in buying a genuine haunted house, so that the spooks can be scientifically studied at leisure. However, as it is he has the good fortune to keep ghosts on the premises.

In his house in Cornwell there have been noises and apparitions, for which his housekeeper blamed the ghost of a moose whose mounted head hangs in the hall. This house is built on the site of barrows and other old burying grounds, and he thinks the manifestations are the work of "elemental ghosts," the result of prehistoric men resenting the invasion of their old territory.

Of these "elemental ghosts" a terrifying selection was shown by limelight from drawings which we were informed were specially made from material supplied by eye-witnesses. The rather noisy smiles of the men were drowned by the shrieks of alarm from the ladies as all kinds of horrors were shown on the screen.

There was, for instance, the figure of a man with a pig's head who haunts trees in Westmoreland and Ireland. The pig's head is rather by way of being a favourite finishing touch to ghosts, for another picture showed a similar type of apparition that haunts a certain burial ground in Northamptonshire. Huge pigs that crouch at the foot of a ghostly gallows from which hangs a ghostly criminal is the appalling phantom-group seen outside a certain farmhouse.

The lecturer's solution was that the lower side of a man's nature was earth-chained in this form when his better self went elsewhere after death. "If you live like a pig," he told his audience threateningly, "you'll be earthbound in the shape of one of these swine."

DRAINS OR GHOSTS?

It may be, too, that your house is really haunted when the drains appear defective, for Mr. O'Donnell stated that ghosts were sometimes smelt and not seen. "This is very disagreeable," he remarked, and the shuddering audience murmured sympathetically.

Sleeping in the dark will quite die out if half the horrors pictured and described at this lecture are realised by the public. In one house, for instance, on opening a bedroom cupboard you see (we are told) a low brutal type of head, with no body, leering at you. In another house ghostly hands lift your chair from the floor as you sit down. If you escape these you may knock at the door of another house only to be stared at by the phantom head of a red-haired servant girl peering over the shoulder of the real maid who opens the door.

Then there is the huge misshapen hand that haunts a house at Land's End, the phantom black cat that jumps on the bed and awakens you, and then vanishes. A certain Devon farm boasts a ghostly headless dog, and in another house you see a phantom man who suddenly throws on the fire the baby he is nursing and disappears. ("And a good job for him," muttered an indignant and motherly old soul sitting in the front row.)

Mr. O'Donnell concluded with a real Christmas ghost yarn which he, even he, admitted to be "inexplainable."

One day a lady saw a rusty old gun lying on her bed. She picked it up in surprise, and was putting it in a drawer when the figure of a young man in an old-fashioned uniform appeared in the room; looked at her and the gun, apologised, and vanished. Soon afterwards she met a man who resembled the apparition, and eventually married him.

After the wedding she went to her room one day to see if the gun were still in the drawer. While she was examining the weapon her husband entered, turned pale on seeing the gun, and at once left the room. He has never since been seen.

While we were still gasping the lights went up, and we crept timidly away, glad to reach the Strand and see solid motor-omnibuses and real flesh and blood fellow-creatures again. But as I write comes a disconcerting thought. I am burning a harmless cigarette! Will the tobacco plant haunt me as Being an accessory after the fact to its extinction?

— The Cornish Telegraph, 24 December 1908

[Swampirella]

What a splendid article, I love it!

[dem bones]

Apr 1, 2024 11:22:57 GMT Swampirella said:

What a splendid article, I love it!

Transcribed a version of O'Donnell's "unexplainable real Christmas ghost story quite recently - Rachel Swete MacNamara's The Sword (The Sketch, 28 Nov. 1917). Also, a splendid example of his beloved pig-faced phantoms - Chelsea's Masked Phantom (Sunday Pictorial, 4 Oct. 1936). The Daily Mirror's The Loch Ness Monster & Other Unexplained Mysteries compilation includes a snippet from the gossip column for 26 September 1925 concerning his "haunted moose antlers."

During his residence in Cornwall a relative sent him a pair of giant elk antlers taken from an Irish bog. He told me that his old housekeeper, whom he described as an original character gifted with the second sight, could not endure the noise of the padding feet of some invisible animal which moved about the place at night. Nor was the commotion at all acceptable to Mr. O'Donnell himself. His housekeeper insisted that the spirit of the elk came every night and they would get no rest till he got rid of the antlers. The present was passed on and peace ensued.