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Post by dem bones on Aug 7, 2016 11:56:25 GMT
Jennie Gray - Tales My Mother Never Told Me (Gargoyles Head Press, The Gothic Society, 1992) Cover photograph: Simon Marsden, The Marsden Archive Grimley Maple Ward Fanny The Black Cabinet Parallel Experiments The Malignants The Double Dream The Mouse In The WainscotBlurb: Jennie Gray is the founder of the Gothic Society and editor of The Goth. She lives in Kent in a Victorian pile which she shares with her husband and a menagerie.
These stories are set in the bleak dream hinterlands and crevices of the brain, with a full cast of incubi, succubi, murderers, phantoms, slugs, cats, wolf dogs, spectral mice, rot, blood, damnation, and all the usual endearing things.Among those endearing things, a supermarket-bought black Forest gateau, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Been too long since I last read this collection, and, memory being murky as it is, all I can remember is thinking "this will be a treasure trove for anthologists!" and wondering which story Stephen Jones would select for the next Best New Horror .... To best of my knowledge the only story to have seen reprint is Double Dream which reappeared in friend Shroudeater's esteemed International vampire 'zine shortly after the collection was published (He always was ahead of the game. IV also ran an extract from the same author's debut novel, The Psychopomp). Despite a glowing review from Maureen Speller in The Ghost Story Society Newsletter #12 (Feb, 1992), Tales My Mother Never Told Me appears to have trundled back to the grave with nary a sepulchral groan. It's time we exhumed it. Grimley: On Steve's insistence, they leave London to move into a lonesome old pile in Betchworth. The protagonist is heartily sick of her husband but can't yet bring herself to walk out on their marriage. At least the countryside brings a new lease of life in that she can walk miles without setting eyes on another human being, and if there's one thing she despises it is other human beings. Especially Steve. And his maddeningly kind, inoffensive family. And that is the state of play the day she is adopted by a bedraggled and horribly injured spectral she-wolf hound she names Grimley after her childhood teddy bear. Once the strange cross-dagger is removed from Grimley's belly, the magnificent creature quickly repairs, and they share in a series of bizarre and ghastly adventures. Of course, we can console ourselves that the narrator has merely suffered a nervous breakdown, people don't turn into fleas, and the episodes of arson, murder, butchery and cannibalism are figments of a diseased imagination ... Maple Ward: A power struggle on the geriatric ward between Bella, a spirited young cleaner, and Frances, a despotic bully of a nurse. Just when it looks as though one party has finally ousted their bitter rival, the ghosts of forgotten patients intervene on their champion's behalf. Love the ending but gentle reader, be warned: the account of the petty cruelties routinely inflicted on the helpless old dears does not make for easy reading (nor should it).
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Post by ripper on Aug 7, 2016 15:14:33 GMT
This sounds like an interesting collection. I don't think I have come across anything by Jennie Gray so will look forward to your thoughts on the stories, Dem.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 8, 2016 16:34:37 GMT
This sounds like an interesting collection. I don't think I have come across anything by Jennie Gray so will look forward to your thoughts on the stories, Dem. Between 1990 and 1998, Jennie Gray's Gargoyles Head Press published 35 issues of Udolpho magazine (nee The Goth) and a string of marvellous books, including the first paperback edition of Peter Haining's The Shilling Shockers (as Tales From The Gothic Bluebooks), Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Resurrection Songs (illustrated by somebody sitting approx. three yards from me as I type), and Sarah Utterson's translation of Fantasmagoriana: Tales Of The Dead. Here's a nice blog post Gothic Heroine. People I'd Like To MeetBack to the book, and an enigmatic tale. "Aickman Gothic" is the best I can come up with. Fanny: Another marriage in crisis. Olivia is already so estranged from her husband that we don't learn his name, he's just a cipher with whom she suffers the vaguest of relationships. Today out walking in the fields she contrived to lose a cherished bracelet. After a fruitless search they retire to a pub overlooking a village of dilapidated council houses. They find themselves in conversation with two amiable if disconcerting locals. Wandering toward them from the village, Fanny, a beautiful, silent, dark haired waif. On a whim Olivia suggests they adopt her. Husband, absolutely besotted of the girl, buys Fanny from her parents for £20,000 ("I would have paid a million if I had to"). Fanny may or may not be a ghost, but the following day she and the husband simply vanish while two ugly yellow slugs manifest on the kitchen wall, leaving Olivia to regret that, wherever they've gone, she wasn't invited.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 8, 2016 17:44:52 GMT
illustrated by somebody sitting approx. three yards from me as I type Small world! Is there not, in fact, a theory to the effect that we are all of us within three "yards" of anyone, notably Kevin Bacon? Or am I misremembering something?
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