Leonard Wolf [ed.] - Wolf’s Complete Book of Terror

[dem bones]

Leonard Wolf [ed.] - Wolf’s Complete Book of Terror (Newmarket Press, 1994)

Cover design: Jerry Pfeifer

Leonard Wolf - Introduction

Kathe Koja - Angels’ Moon
Joyce Carol Oates - Poor Bibi
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Junichiro Tanizaki - The Tattooer
Julio Cortázar - Axolotl
Roald Dahl - The Wish
Shirley Jackson - The Lottery
Jerome Bixby - It’s a Good Life
Richard Matheson - Born of Man and Woman
Jorge Luís Borges - The South
George Langelaan - The Fly
Algernon Blackwood - The Doll
T. F. Powys - The Hunted Beast
Ben Hecht - The Rival Dummy
Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo
Saki - Sredni Vashtar
H. P. Lovecraft - The Picture in the House
H. G. Wells - Pollock and the Porroh Man
Hanns Heinz Ewers - The Spider
Frederick Marryat - The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains
Sax Rohmer - Tchériapin
W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey’s Paw
Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast
Lafcadio Hearn - Yuki-Onna
Bram Stoker - The Squaw
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Carmilla
Rosa Mulholland - Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time
Guy de Maupassant - The Horla
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Birthmark
Prosper Mérimée - La Belle Helene
Anon - Nuckelavee
P’u Sung-Ling - The Painted Skin
Charles Perrault - Bluebeard
Lucius Apuleius - The Vampire

Author Biographies

Blurb:
The frightening realm of terror beckons ....

This anthology of 36 spine—tingling stories spans the history of the terrifying in literature, beginning with the recent tales of the macabre by Joyce Carol Oates and Kathe Koja and concluding with one of the original vampire tales by the second—century Roman poet Lucius Apuleius. In between is a dazzling array of the fiction of fear, plunging the reader into the nightmarish world of frightening and unexpected events, with chilling repercussions. Some of the pieces are now familiar classics, such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," Shirley Jackson’s "The Lottery," or George Langelaan's "The Fly." Other selections, equally as haunting but not as well-known masterpieces, have been uncovered by Leonard Wolf through his long-term fascination with the truly spooky. All are distinguished by their unarguable knack of striking terror in the delighted hearts of their readers.

An eclectic selection merging over-anthologised "classics" (and he knows great when he sees it) with relative obscurities. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that this seems to be the first publication of Ben Hecht's The Rival Dummy — basis for the 1929 movie The Great Gabbo and a clear influence on Dead of Night's cracked ventriloquist sequence — in a supernatural/ horror selection.

MTF

[enoch]

I mainly remember this anthology as the first place I ever encountered Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman."  I've heard that it created a minor sensation in horror & SF circles when it was first published, and I can see why.  It still packs a punch.

[dem bones]

Feb 8, 2022 6:20:00 GMT enoch said:

I mainly remember this anthology as the first place I ever encountered Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman."  I've heard that it created a minor sensation in horror & SF circles when it was first published, and I can see why.  It still packs a punch.

Can't place it, but now I've made a start on Complete Book of Terror, will try (re?)read it tonight.

Charles Perrault - Bluebeard: (Histoire ou contes du temps passé, 1697). Bluebeard is the wealthy owner of several houses, but women fear him on sight as he is ugly as sin, though he can be charm itself when the occasion demands. Much married, no one ever thinks to ask what became of his wives. No sooner has he taken his latest bride than he is called away for six weeks. Handing her a bunch of keys, he gives her the run of the building bar the small closet on the ground floor. Under no circumstances must she ever unlock that door. Of course, curiosity betters her, and we know what's coming.

First time read for me. A brilliant horror story in four pages, though, arguably, it would be even more affecting were it shorn of the final paragraphs.

Prosper Mérimée - La Belle Hélène: (La Guzla, 1827). Piero Stamati, "small, old, ugly and stunted," propositions the lovely Hélène Khonopka while husband Theodore is away on a 365 day business trip in Venice. Furious that she should dare reject his advances, Stamati consults an evil Jewish sorcerer, who has his boy take Hélène a beautiful fruit rinsed in crucified toad venom. Hélène's belly swells as though she were pregnant. Husband returns. Seriously put out at his wife's infidelity, he takes out his sword, cuts off her head, and that's when things take a very nasty turn ....

Anon - Nuckelavee: Scottish Folktale: Tammas's narrow and fortuitous escape from a giant, skinless man-pig-loch monster hybrid comes at the cost of his bonnet.

Kathe Koja - Angel's Moon (Byron Preiss, David Kellor, Megan Miller & John Gregory Betancourt [eds.], The Ultimate Werewolf, 1991). Ethan Parrish was a brilliant poet before his hospitalisation at Bridgemoor psychiatric clinic. It was while under heavy sedation he first experienced miraculous transformation. Self-discharged from the clinic, Parrish struggles to cope. When a well-intentioned Uni professor promises to help him, he lives in constant dread of her discovering where he lives. A desperately sad story and, for me at least, one that works so much better away from it's source anthology.

[dem bones]

Loved all of these.

Lafcadio Hearn - Yuki-Onna: (Kwaidan, 1904). A woodsman and his eighteen-year-old apprentice take shelter in a fisherman's hut. They are set upon by the beautiful white woman of the snow, who silently drains the life essence from the old man. She spares Mino-Kichi on account of his youth and beauty, but "if you ever tell anybody — even your own mother — about what you have seen this night, I shall know it; and then I will kill you ... Remember what I say."

Several years later, Mino-Kichi confides in his beloved, super-pale O-Yuki, mother of his ten children ...

Richard Matheson - Born of Man and Woman: (MF&SF, Summer 1950). Told from the perspective of an inarticulate, chained child-beast in the cellar, hidden from the world by parents at the end of their tether, who keep it in line with a stick. The infant is so powerful as to frequently tug its chain free of the brickwork to spy at the window on little sister, her playmates, her vicious kitten .... Soon as the author introduces a pet into the proceedings, we feel uneasy. Not sure the story requires the shock kiss off - it's arguably more horrific without?

Ben Hecht - The Rival Dummy: (Liberty, 18 Aug 1928). Joe Ferris, vaudeville booking agent, recalls the final out between the Great Gabbo and Jimmy, greatest ventriloquist act you never saw, after the former fell for and hired a dumpy magician's assistant of no discernible talent. The lovely Rubina, who loathed Gabbo much as he doted on her, delighted in fawning over his wisecracking sidekick until hostilities between man and wooden dummy escalated to murder.

Joyce Carol Oates - Poor Bibi : (Tikkun, May/Jun 1992, as Poor Thing). A couple bring their ailing, very difficult pet (otherwise known as a child) to animal welfare for termination, only for the vet to angrily refuse and have them thrown off the premises. "You do this simple procedure for others all the time - why not for us?" Their protests fallen on deaf ears, the angry pair drive to the river where husband takes care of poor Bibi. Account ends in snipe at the sanctimonious hypocrites who would dare condemn their actions.

[dem bones]

Have since learned that the version at hand (Newmarket Press, 1994) is a much revised edition of the original, published by Clarkson N. Potter in 1979 which lacks the Kathe Koja story but includes the following.

Short fiction

Harlan Ellison - I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Anthony Boucher - They Bite
Ray Bradbury - The Last Night of the World
Richard Hughes - The Ghost
E. F. Benson - Caterpillars
Stephen Crane - Manacled
Lafcadio Hearn - Mujina
Anonymous [F. H. Groome ] - The Magic Shirt
Anonymous [H. Wellington Vrooman] - The Man-Tiger
Anonymous - The Milk-White Doo
Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum

Poetry
Helen Adam - I Love My Love
John Crowe Ransom - Piazza Piece
Langston Hughes - End
Heinrich Hoffmann - The Very Sad Tale of the Matches
Lola Ridge - My Doll Janie
Charles Baudelaire - A Carrion
John Keats - La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John Keats - Isabella, or The Pot of Basil
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Erl-King
Anonymous - Lord Randal
John Milton - Satan at the Gates of Hell, from Paradise Lost, Book II
Anonymous - The Wife of Usher's Well

Excerpts
Jerzy Kosinski - Steps
J. K. Huysmans - The Black Mass
Comte de Lautréamont - The Hours in the Life of a Lousy-Haired Man
James Malcolm Rymer - Varney, the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood
Marquis de Sade - The Count de Gernande
Uncredited - Jaël

[Swampirella]

Feb 9, 2022 11:32:22 GMT dem bones said:

Loved all of these.

Lafcadio Hearn - Yuki-Onna: (Kwaidan, 1904). A woodsman and his eighteen-year-old apprentice take shelter in a fisherman's hut. They are set upon by the beautiful white woman of the snow, who silently drains the life essence from the old man. She spares Mino-Kichi on account of his youth and beauty, but "if you ever tell anybody — even your own mother — about what you have seen this night, I shall know it; and then I will kill you ... Remember what I say."

Several years later, Mino-Kichi confides in his beloved, super-pale O-Yuki, mother of his ten children ...

"Kwaidan" was also a pretty good movie, featuring "Yuki-no-Onna" and two other Hearn stories.

[dem bones]

Feb 9, 2022 12:00:25 GMT Swampirella said:

"Kwaidan" was also a pretty good movie, featuring "Yuki-no-Onna" and two other Hearn stories.

To my shame, I've not seen it. The still perfectly captures the mood of the story.

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Tattooer: (Seven Japanese Tales, 1963. Translator, Howard Hibbett). Seikichi derives a perverted kick from the pain his needles inflict upon every customer. His ambition is to tattoo a masterpiece of morbidity on the skin of a beautiful woman. A teenage girl provides the canvas, but Seikichi's ambition is achieved at the greatest personal cost.

Julio Cortázar - Axolotl: (End of the Game & Other Stories, 1967. Translator, Paul Blackburn). The protagonist's sympathetic with an amphibious salamander at the aquarium sees them slowly exchange bodies. Uh ...

[dem bones]

Wolf's later Horror: A Connoisseur's Guide is a companion volume to Complete Book of Terror in that he provides synopses and analysis of the stories included therein.

Prof. Leonard Wolf - Horror: A Connoisseur's Guide (FactsOnFile, 1989)

Rubens The head of the Medusa

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Alphabetical Entries
Bibliography
Index

Blurb:
From the thumping of Edgar Allan Poe's tell-tale heart to the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, horror has been one of the most enduring popular themes in fiction. The use of horror as a literary vehicle can be traced from ancient Greek tragedies to the gothic fiction of 19th-century England to today's Broadway adaptation of Phantom of the Opera and the emergence of the slasher film.
Covering every aspect of the genre, HORROR presents more than 400 of the best, most original, historically significant. and even worst works of horror from film and literature. Alphabetically listed, each entry functions as a capsule review, providing a plot summary along with a critical evaluation of each work's contribution to the horror genre.
This fascinating and comprehensive guide includes comment on such creations as Frankenstein, King Kong, the Blob, the Invisible Man, Freddy Krueger and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Also included are works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, H.G. Wells and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as examples from Japanese, German,Russian,and French literature.
Film entries have credit listings including title, country, date of release, production company, producer, director, screenplay, music, special effects, and cast. Literature entries contain the title of the novel or short story, its author, publisher, and date of publication. An introductory essay discusses the history and nature of horror as a literary/ artistic phenomenon.
Leonard Wolf is a man who clearly loves horror literature and film. He brings to this book three qualities that are rarely to be found in discussions of the horror genre: an astute literary intelligence, the writing skills of a poet and fiction writer, and a compassionate sensitivity to the sexual and family dynamics that are its real agenda. These gifts illuminate his comments on the great works he reviews and at the same time they enable him to spotlight for us surprisingly powerful and poignant moments, even in such dreadful ventures as Varney the Vampire, Basket Case, and I Dismember Momma
Both a history of the genre and a guidebook, HORROR is the first book of its kind to treat the horror arts with a high-level critical assessment and scholarly commentary. With more than 75 illustrations from films and literature, this book is an indispensable reference for all aficionados of the horror genre .

Leonard Wolf is a native of Transylvania who no lives in New York City. He is also the author of The Annotated Dracula, The Annotated Frankenstein, and Wolf's Complete Book of Terror.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Feb 10, 2022 17:34:24 GMT dem bones said:

Wolf's later Horror: A Connoisseur's Guide is a companion volume to Complete Book of Terror in that he provides synopses and analysis of the stories included therein.

I own this curious book and always wondered what its intended purpose might be. Things are now a bit clearer.