Pan Horror #4: Spectres/ Spider vs Doll

[dem bones]

Herbert Van Thal (ed) - The 4th Pan Book Of Horror Stories (Pan, 1963)

William Sansom - Various Temptations
M. S. Waddell - The Pale Boy
Ray Bradbury - The Emissary
Robert Bloch - Lucy Comes To Stay
Richard Davis - Guy Fawkes Night
Vivian Meik - The Two Old Women
Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata
Septimus Dale - The Little Girl Eater
Rosemary Timperley - Harry
Ray Russell - Sardonicus
Robert Aickman - Ringing the Changes
Hugh Reid - Dulcie
M. S. Waddell - The Importance of Remaining Ernest
Joseph Payne Brennan - Slime
Adobe James - The Ohio Love Sculpture
Davis Grubb - The Horsehair Trunk
Alex Hamilton - The Attic Express
Elliott O’Donnell - The Haunted Telephone
Sir Frederick Treves - The Elephant Man

Haven't got the earlier one with the beautiful spectre illustration so this will have to do.

The real oddity is Sir Frederick Treves true account of his experiences with John Merrick which is the basis for the movie of the same name. Amazingly, it works very well in this context.
Bloch's story is probably best known from Amicus's Asylum, with Britt Ekland taking the part of the murderous Ms. Hyde of the piece.

Slime is one of the best man-eating oozy blob stories ever written. Adobe James' ... Love Sculpture resurfaced in Parry's Devil's Kisses, and Moonlight Sonata causes more shudders in a few pages than most authors can manage in a novel. Actually virtually everything in this is great - we get a Jack the Ripper story, a classic variation on the Hell Hound, a terrifying journey aboard a model train and the joyous cod-gothic melodramatics of Sardonicus. Richard Davis' November 5th nightmare is the one that got me though.

Van Thal was on a roll, but he was also running out of old material and gradually, over the next few, we'd meet some of the mainstays of the series. Martin Waddell is just about the only new face in #4, and while he has his admirers, mostly his stories just leave me cold.

William Sansom - Various Temptations (Something Terrible, Something Lovely, 1948): Ronald Raikes, 31, is wanted for questioning in connection with the Victoria murders. Four London prostitutes have been strangled in a week and the known sex-offender has gone to ground. On impulse, he climbs a ladder and climbs in the open bedroom window of Clara, a plain and lonely woman who's just been reading about the slayings. Telling her not to be frightened, he finds himself pouring out a very diluted account of his life story. Despite suspecting him to be the murderer, still she shelters him, finding it all a great adventure and soon they are making arrangements for their wedding. To celebrate his 32nd birthday, Clara throws him a party and, much to her own amazement, dolls herself up for the occasion, getting her hair done, buying a new blouse and even applying a dash of lipstick which is probably not the most advisable course of action in the circumstances, though the creepy undercurrent suggests she had a death wish all along.

Joseph Payne Brennan - Slime (Weird Tales, March 1953): "A thing of slimy blackness, a thing which had no essential shape, no discernible earthly features. It was a shape of utter darkness, one second a great flopping hood, the next a black viscid pool of living ooze which flowed upon itself, sliding forward with incredible speed."

Blown from the ocean bed by a volcanic eruption, the slime takes up home in Wharton's Swamp on the outskirts of Clinton Center. Cursed of an insatiable appetite, it devours all living things in its path, getting its first taste of human flesh when wino Henry Hossing sets up camp in the trees. Next up is old man Gowse's cow, followed shortly afterward by his neighbour, Rupert Barnaby. At first his claims that there's something terrible lurking in the swamp are laughed off as further evidence of his lunacy, and the slime amasses a considerable number of victims before Chief Underbeck realises he's right.

Rosemary Timperley - Harry: “There were newspaper stories of kidnapping, baby-snatching, child-murders….”

Regarded by many to be Timperley’s finest ghost story. Mrs. James is anxious about her adopted daughter Christine’s growing attachment to an “imaginary” brother, Harry. When she refuses to begin infant school because Harry can’t accompany her - he’s fourteen - her Mum loses patience. A visit to the doctor doesn’t help so Mrs. James decides it’s time to find out what she can about Christine’s history before she and Jim adopted her. Whatever happened to her real parents?

Hugh Reid - Dulcie: World War II and a Jack the Ripper type is loose in London, this one targeting lone women as they make their way to the communal air raid shelter prior to the night's bombings. Five women have been slain in a week, their sliced and decapitated remains left slumped in shop doorways. Now the sirens wail again, and Dulcie sets out into the street.

Septimus Dale - The Little Girl Eater: The pier has collapsed leaving Mason, his back broken, trapped beneath a steel girder with the tide coming in. His only hope is that little Miranda will inform her mummy and mummy's "friend" Johnny of his plight. But Johnny, full of himself having just given the girl's mummy one, fills her head with some scary tale about a little girl eater, and Miranda no longer wants to help Mason - she wants to kill him.

Robert Bloch - Lucy Comes To Stay: Vi is in rehab, drying out after a humiliating drunken episode at a party. Her friend Lucy convinces her that her husband George and special nurse Miss Higgins are having an affair and that they have no intention of seeing her released from the Asylum. In alcoholic and psychological meltdown, Vi is easily persuaded to make a desperate bid for freedom ....

Vivian Meik - The Two Old Women: A sequel to his Honeymoon In Hate from Devil's Drums. "They are human ghouls - perverted, secret drinkers and probably given to morally corrupt practices." Meik moves into a multi-occupied house near Havestock Hill and befriends a young woman who has been kind to him from the first. He learns that she is being preyed upon by the two Mrs. Kemp's on an upper floor, a pair of voodoo-practicing horrors and the elderly relatives of Martin, whose body they claimed when he eventually died the previous year. First they accuse the girl of owing them £10 and even produce an IOU signed by her to that effect, then they waver the debt in exchange for a half a pint of her blood, which they forcibly attract. Now, they are after her flesh to revive Martin.

Ray Russell - Sardonicus: Sir Robert Cargrave, Harley Street specialist, receives an invite from old flame Maud Randall to visit she and her husband at Castle Sardonicus in Bohemia. When he arrives, he finds his former sweetheart much changed, the once carefree and vivacious girl now sad and distant. One look at her pale-to-the-point-of-translucence husband explains the situation: he is disfigured with "Ricus Sardonicus", his lips permanently pulled apart to display his teeth in perpetual ghastly smile. The affliction was brought on when, as a young man, he dug up his father's body to attain the winning lottery ticket that was buried with him(!).

Sardonicus first tries to bribe the doctor by promising him a night of passion with Maud if he'll operate, then threatens to rape her when the disgusted Cargrave refuses. Reluctantly, our hero complies with the madman's wishes ...

Martin Waddell - The Pale Boy: Mrs. Ethel Burnell is set upon adopting a little boy and when she visits the orphanage and is introduced to Paul, not even husband George's indifference can thwart her. "Little Paulie" is weak and impossibly thin with two worryingly over-sized front teeth which he certainly doesn't waste on munching his greens. First the kitten, then George go missing and when they find the latter's skeleton gnawed to the bone, the Police alert the community that there's a wild animal on the prowl.

Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata: A “true” story, published in America rather than the UK on account of it being far too scandalous and horrific for the English press! All names - except for that of the lunatic - have been altered to protect Woollcott from a libel suit. Honestly!

Cazalet invites his friend Dr. Alvan Barach to stay at his crumbling manor house (Barach thinks of it as ‘The Creeps, Sevenoaks, Kent’). The guest is disturbed in his sleep and wakes to discover a figure intently sewing in the corner of his room. At first, he takes this to be one of the ghosts he’s been warned about, but the discovery of cook’s mutilated body disillusions him of that one …

[redbrain]

What a disappointing cover the spider and doll is - replacing the brilliant blue spectres. Whatever were the people at Pan thinking???

[paisleycravat]

I think this one's mostly pretty great. 'Dulcie' and 'The Importance of Remaining Ernest' were the only two that I found disappointing.

[benedictjjones]

i bought the one with the doll and spider for a couple of quid at the book stalls under waterloo bridge. didn't think much of the cover either to be honest.

[benedictjjones]

REREAD 'ringing the changes' last night and enjoyed it very much.

[dem bones]

Ms. Bluehour recently wrote on Vault Wordpress

Don’t forget Adobe James - The Ohio Love Sculpture: Easily the creepiest story I’ve EVER read.

If you don't have a copy (Michel Parry also used it in The Devil's Kisses) and want to see what all the fuss is about, our friend has now posted the story as a downloadable pdf at
blue hour collective

[Scott Wood]

May 28, 2008 9:58:02 GMT benedictjjones said:

REREAD 'ringing the changes' last night and enjoyed it very much.

I loved "Ringing the Changes" too. I'm rereading all the Pan books I can get hold of and 4 is my favorite so far.

"Harry", "Sardonicus" and "Ringing the Changes" are three of the best horror stories I've read and it was a brilliant to read them in a row.

"Harry" is a fine ghost story and "Sardonicus" fed the bit of me that loves a bit of ober-the-top twentieth century gothic. I worried that 'Ringing the Changes' would be like the 'Wicker Man' but, no, wow, brilliant.

[benedictjjones]

the one i didn't like in this one was the one involving the sisters who are into some form of african voodoo in their bayswater cellar - i really hoped theyd kill the far too perfect hero!!

[dem bones]

Herbert Van Thal (ed.) - The Fourth Pan Book Of Horror Stories (Pan, 1963)

W. Francis Phillips

Blurb:
THE LITTLE GIRL EATER - SLIME ‑ THE HORSEHAIR TRUNK ‑

The very titles suggest the sinister, perhaps the horrible?

Correct. But there are other stories, too, in this startling collection of beastliness which may make your blood run even colder, may make your hair stand up even straighter.

Try VARIOUS TEMPTATIONS or THE OHIO LOVE SCULPTURE!

Nineteen stories of the fiendish and the fearful in a new volume of a best-selling series.

M. S. Waddell - The Importance of Remaining Ernest: Ernest Tracey escaped the Death penalty when his lawyers declared him unfit to plead and is now incarcerated in an Italian Asylum, the only sane man among the "canvas sacks of despair" and the casually brutal wardens. The trick is to bide his time. It won't be long before the doctors declare him cured, so all he need do is keep the right side of fellow inmates 'The Butcher', Freke and Mandrake on the one hand, Jantz the male nurse on the other. On no account must he give Jantz any excuse to have him transferred to Block B. All is going to plan until Jantz picks a fight with toenail obsessive Mandrake in the Day room ...

Alex Hamilton - The Attic Express: Hector Coley insists he installed the model railway in the attic solely for the benefit of his son, Brian, a morose youth who, of course, couldn't be less interested in his father's pride and joy. "Think of me being on it ... and run it accordingly," berates Mr. Coley. If only the selfish, patronising old fool were to shrink to scale, Brian could finally enjoy operating the controls ...

Davis Grubb - The Horsehair Trunk: Bedridden with typhoid, Marius Lindsay, editor of Ohio's The Daily Argus, develops the ability to astral project at will. He soon trains his astral self to lift small objects, initially to play tricks on Mary Ann, his desperately unhappy young trophy wife. But when he learns that Mary Ann and furniture salesman Jim O'Toole plan to sail away to a new life in Louisville, Lindsay books a cabin aboard the steamship. On the first night, he sets his ghostly self to stealing a butchers' knife from the kitchen ....

[David A. Riley]

This is my second favourite Pan Horror cover. It's years since I last read it but your comments so far are tempting me to take another dip!

[Craig Herbertson]

When I was little I liked the spectre cover so much I painted a copy of it.

[dem bones]

I'm a big fan of the spider vs. doll cover, but W. Francis Phillips' spectral masterpiece is my pick of the entire series. It's taken me all these years to get hold of a copy until back-of-the-van-man came up with the goods last Sunday (he's on a roll!).

Commented upon elsewhere: Elliott O’Donnell's The Haunted Telephone, Richard Davis's Guy Fawkes Night, Robert Aickman's Ringing the Changes, Adobe James's The Ohio Love Sculpture and Ray Bradbury's The Emissary, which, by my reckoning leaves only Sir Frederick Treve's heartbreaking account of the life and times of The Elephant Man which some readers - but not this one - may find incongruous. Am looking forward to a revisit in the near future.

[nsturm451]

Finally finished this one the other night; I'm a bit of a slow reader and have been busy getting ready for the holidays.

First of all, I have the older cover with the specters; being arachnophobic I think the other one is pretty effective too, but the specters are better.

"Various Temptations" - 2/5
I don't much care for Sansom's longwinded style, and the ending isn't hard to predict, but there are some interesting ideas in this one - Clara is so bored and lonely that she doesn't even care if Raikes is a killer.

"The Pale Boy" - 3/5
Seems a bit quaint and obvious, but fun and gets the job done.

"The Emissary" - 4/5
As usual, Bradbury's prose gives us a nice contrast between a sense of beauty and wonder, followed by horrific wrongness. Could be a bit scarier, but still very good.

"Lucy Comes to Stay" - 4/5
I saw the adaptation of this in Asylum prior to reading it so I knew what was going on, but still liked how Bloch doesn't come right out and tell us the twist, exactly, so that we end up going back and seeing how Lucy is a wishful-thinking projection.

"Guy Fawkes Night" - 4/5
This was one of the best-written stories in the book, however I feel that it went on a bit longer than need be for an ending that's easy to see coming. Do have to wonder what the hell they did with the original Guy, though.

"The Two Old Women" - 1/5
Probably the weakest story in the book; feels cheesy and badly dated, though the idea of a pit and altar in the basement was kind of cool.

"Moonlight Sonata" - 5/5
Loved it! Short and to the point (though still with some nice purple prose) and such a gleefully gruesome ending. I actually forgot that this one was also in that old Cerf & Wagner collection (and hadn't read it there yet).

"The Little Girl Eater" - 3/5
Nasty little story, in a good way. It's amazing how easily adults (especially misbehaving adults) forget that children can misinterpret things when they're still distinguishing fantasy from reality.

"Harry" - 4/5
Straightforward but creepy ghost story. I like how Timperley repeats the first few lines at the end, after we've been able to appreciate what she means by them.

"Sardonicus" - 4/5
This was actually one of the main reasons I bought the book; it was hard to resist the allure of a Gothic Horror send-up written by a Playboy editor. Russell actually emulated the 19th Century style quite successfully, and gave us an entertainingly overwrought piece of work. If anything, it could have used a bit more "horror", but still good stuff.

"Ringing the Changes" - 5/5
Wow. This one leaves me with more questions than answers, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The subtleties of character, the vivid setting, the creepy implications (what, exactly, did Phrynne step on when they were out on the beach?)... now I see why people regard Aickman as an underappreciated hero of the genre.

"Dulcie" - 3/5
Pretty good serial-killer yarn. Setting it during the Blitz was an interesting touch, and the descriptions of "Dulcie" rolling around in her bag were really quite unsettling.
 
"The Importance of Remaining Earnest" - 4/5
This quite disturbed me, probably because I majored in Psych and always thought Ronald Reagan was a tool for shutting down so many of the U.S.'s asylums; however one has to wonder if those institutions were such a great place to begin with. The jet-black humor at the end sold me on this one.

"Slime" - 4/5
I get the impression that a LOT of monster-on-the-loose-in-a-small-town tales have been based on this. Brennan's prose gets a bit cheesy at times, but it's a fun story. Interesting how he begins by describing the creature's undersea habitat, and even gets inside its "head".

"The Ohio Love Sculpture" - 3/5
Good story for what it is. I almost feel like the perversity of it could have been elaborated a bit more (i.e., where did he get those girls from?), though.

"The Horsehair Trunk" - 4/5
I could nitpick little things about this one - there's no indication that Marius beats his wife until Jim says so (unless that was the point, and Mary Ann was just making it up?), for example - but both the main premise and the ending are clever and awesome. Thumbs up to the title being almost (but not quite) a red herring, and not describing exactly what happens after the end, so we're left to ponder it in all its unpleasantness.

"The Attic Express" - 3/5
I'm not very familiar with model trains so the lengthy descriptions of the set were a bit hard to follow at times, and the story seemed to go on longer than it needed to, but an amusing idea with an ending that seemed appropriately jarring after the almost light-hearted and fantasy-ish feel of the rest of the story.

"The Haunted Telephone" - 2/5
There's not much to this story, really, even if it did hold my interest reasonably well.

"The Elephant Man" - 4/5
An odd choice, but a good read. Interesting contrast between the horror of Merrick's appearance (I've seen photos of him, and the extent of his deformity is almost impossible to describe, but Treves comes pretty close) and the poignancy of his tragic situation and gentle personality.

Overall this is probably one of the better horror collections I've read, and would be one I'd consider giving to someone as a primer course in mid-20th Century horror fiction. I also like the variety on display - a lot of modern anthologies seem to restrict themselves to specific themes, which takes away some of the element of anticipation and surprise.

I'm also about a third of the way through the Ninth book and will do a write-up for that one next; the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth ought to be arriving in the mail soon as well.

[dem bones]

Shows you how long it is since I last read #4. I had it confused with the previous volume - the "personal favourite" I referred to in reply to your initial post, not that I dislike #4 in the least. It's a transitional volume, in that Van Thal introduced more contemporary authors than had previously been the case though there are still several reprints. It makes for a decent balance. Slime has indeed been ripped off - in the case of Victor Norwood's Night Of The Black Horror, pretty much wholesale! Could be that William Sanson will grow on you, or at least, this reader shared your opinion of his style to begin with, came to greatly appreciate his work with the passing of years. HVT was clearly a big fan and a decade later was still showcasing Sanson - and Robert Aickman - in his two volume Bedside Books of Strange Stories. The inclusion of Sir Frederick Treves' The Elephant Man is added extra poignancy by the late John Burke's observation; "I've known men who are not that handsome, and some who may be lumpish, glowering, ill-favoured, call it what you will...but Bertie was quite terrifyingly, downright ugly!" (as shared with us by Van Thal's biographer, Johnny Mains here.

[nsturm451]

Ah ok, it does seem like all of the first four books are quite popular here. I'll have to read the 2nd and 3rd when I can find them for a reasonable price. And, interesting bit of trivia there. Ha, would be interesting if someone were to turn up a photo...