Pan 15 - The Effervescing Skull!

[andydecker]

And here is finally the rest of Pan 15 ...

Alex White - On the Box

There are better – or let's say more original - Alex White stories, but it had a few laughs. In a time where we have become buried in serial killer tales this has aged badly. But in hindsight this is interesting for the casual Hannibal parts which here is just a throwaway idea. And I loved the last paragraph. Again a cliché since good old Norman Bates, still it was funny.

Charles Thornton - Sanctuary – For the Piped

A rats story in the same year of Herbert's The Rats. Hm. If I wanted to wax pretentiously I could write something about the real horrors of gentrification – long before it became a topic - and poor old Nellie who fed one pigeon rat too many. Still it seemed a bit like filler.

Morag Greer - The Gates Were Locked

It comes always as a surprise if you read a concept which seemed so clever just 20 years ago, then you realize that it was 50 year ago already there but just got no further notice. "I see dead people" indeed. I have reservations about two stories by the same writer in one anthology, but in this case it is quite interesting as they are so different. Unfortunately I was too lazy to re-read this – a bit too - long story to see if Greer played fair and dropped enough hints so readers could see the end coming. But it was a nicely written ghost story which maybe would have been more effective with a few cuts for length. If a novella depends on a punch-line it has to be the mother of all punch-lines to work, and I am not sure if this is here the case. But in 1974 our ways were a bit different than today so what do I know? Guess as a young lad I would have been blown away provided I had understood the ending at all.

Conrad Hill – Wally

And speaking of a bit different: wow! Just wow! This ticked off enough boxes to piss off a lot of the contemporary audience. I absolutely loved it. It isn't in the slightest realistic, it is an attack on values, it is gross and thoroughly mean and it plays with literary techniques. But I had to chuckle a lot. It is material like this which is missing in today's horror anthologies.

While I am beginning to see where the critique about the Pan Book comes from and the very sameness is a bit much when reading these in one sitting, I have to say that #15 was surprisingly muted. It offered more variety than earlier volumes – Greer's second entry is exactly the opposite of Hill – and I would think that some readers back then were a bit disappointed over the often more mellow than usual content. If stories have the potential to stay in my mind, here are at last three - both Conrad Hill and the second Morag Greer. And if I forget the nitpicking there were only a few I later thought I could have skipped.

Onward to #16.