Mary Danby - The 12th Fontana Book Of Great Horror Stories (Fontana, 1979)
John Holmes"Thirteen gruesome tales of shivering darkness ..."
Bryn Fortey - Merry-Go-Round
Dorothy K. Haynes - King Of The Fair
Bram Stoker - The Secret Of The Growing Gold
Margaret Irwin - Monsieur Seeks A Wife
Theodore Sturgeon - The Other Celia
Charles Thornton - For The Sake Of Alf
Dino Buzzati - Something Beginning With 'L'
Kay Leigh - The Huntress
W. W. Jacobs - The Well
Terry Tapp - The Invaders
L. A. Lewis - Hybrid
Hal Pink - The Screaming Plant
Mary Danby - The Engelmayer PuppetsIt's been so long since I read this, it's like having a brand new book
Terry Tapp predicts the Ants invasion, Mary Danby scores with an Amicus style just desserts shocker and you wouldn't want anything to do with the something beginning with 'L' of Dino Buzzati's typically morbid mini-masterpiece. And then there's one of the most formula of the demon plant stories which everyone seems to have written at least one of in the 1930's.
Includes:
Bryn Fortey - Merry-Go-Round: David Morgan is duped into committing murder by his conniving lover Jane. When he learns of her scheming, he kills both her and the husband he didn’t know she had, then blows his own brains out. He finds himself four months back in the past, on the very night he met Jane. Has he been given a chance to set things right?
Hal Pink - The Screaming Plant:
"A figure with the body, arms and legs of a man, but with roots instead of hands and feet and a cluster of leaves where the head should have been .. the mandrake was supposed to be a plant with human form and the voracity of a carnivorous animal which reached out with its root tentacles to seize unsuspecting herb-gatherers and crush them to death, gaining strength from their blood." Botanist Barker has recently acquired a genuine mandrake seed and, when it germinates, the plant grows to monstrous proportions, taking over the cellar. It's size isn't the only imposing thing about it: "Flower-shaped suckers there were indeed, opening and shutting like so many gasping mouths waiting for food. Tom, the Persian cat is the first victim, the plant totally exsanguinating him, and then it corners Barker. When the narrator rushes to the rescue, they hack the abomination to pieces with an axe, accompanied by the sound of its screams.
Terry Tapp - The Invaders: Several million strong, the starving army of mutant red ants cross the prairie and descend on the cabin of Seth, Stella and little Alice Kenyon. The family’s only hope is if they can flood the cornfield before the terrible termites reach them. A nasty late-’seventies rewrite of Carl Stephenson’s classic
Leiningen Versus The Ants.
L. A. Lewis - Hybrid: In his youth Chambers was plagued by nightmares which a clairvoyant later convinced him were flashbacks from a previous life when he was an adept black magician. when Chambers marries and takes up home in Sussex he realises that this is where his diabolical incarnation practiced evil and the adjoining field is where he was burnt at the stake. his familiar, a raven-like bird, gradually takes him over until - as his devoted wife explains to Dr. Cole - “His body is mad, but his mind is sane”. chambers degenerates into a hopping, squawking sex maniac and ravishes his wife. Dr. Cole eventually gets a specialist to take care of him but in the meantime Mrs. Chambers gives birth …
Dino Buzzati - Something Beginning With ‘L’: Shroder, a prosperous timber merchant, loses all after forcing a ragged man to help push his cart out of a ditch. His actions were certainly little regrettable, but the true horror of the story is in the craven behaviour of Dr. Lugosi and the sadistic glee Sheriff Valerio takes in the stranger’s ghastly fate.
W. W. Jacobs - The Well: Jem Benson is to marry the local beauty but his cousin Wilfred, facing ruination, is blackmailing him over some letters to a former lover. Wilfred disappears shortly after their argument and Jem begins to display a previously unremarked horror of the old well in the park where he and fiancee Alice conduct much of their courtship. When Alice loses her bracelet in the murky waters he has no option but to retrieve it. The following morning, with two of his trusted servants manning the ropes, he descends to the bottom ….
Kay Leigh - The Huntress: On her way home from the night shift Hilary finds herself trapped in a parallel world after an encounter with a desperate man looking for a street that shouldn’t exist.
Charles Thornton - For The Sake Of Alf: Alf and Ada Clark run a successful cafe. Business is thriving until Ada loses the uses of her legs and the surly Mrs. Marlow is drafted in as replacement cook. Now they are fast going broke and the butcher will no longer give them credit. Desperate measures are called for.
Mary Danby - The Engelmayer Puppets: Doncaster. Gwendoline Porter-Grant lost her husband in the war and now all she has left of her family is a ghastly son, Sir William, an arrogant sixteen year old bully who will inherit the mausoleum of a house and the family fortune when he reaches twenty-one. His favourite threat is that he'll cut her off without a penny.
At the Castle Fenton Annual Antique Fair, William acts his usual boorish self, upsetting traders and embarrassing his mother before they encounter Julius Von Bick who offers them an Austrian Puppet Theatre for the ludicrously tiny sum of one guinea. William buys it, thinking to sell it on at a massive profit. But not before he's mauled the puppets around some and put on a show for his mother that she'll never forget ...
Such a shame that Danby's horror stories don't seem to have been collected.
