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Post by dem bones on Sept 12, 2008 11:30:52 GMT
We had a dry run at an 'All Creatures Great And Small (Hate Us)' menagerie on the old board, but no harm in reviving and expanding it to unfeasible lengths! We've already had a look at spiders, the vampires of the insect world, but what about Rats. You can't really go wrong with them, can you?/color] Henry Kuttner - The Graveyard Rats: ( Weird Tales, March 1936). Salem. old Masson, the cemetery caretaker, supplements his income by robbing the dead of their gold teeth and jewellery. Comes the rainy night when he digs up a grave to find the rats have gnawed a hole in it and dragged the corpse off along one of they innumerable tunnels. He crawls in after them .. An incredibly busy plot - Kuttner even drags an animated, festering corpse into the proceedings - in it's day this was probably as ghastly a full-on horror story as had ever been written. Michael Annesly - Rats: A Berkely barn is besieged by million upon million of them. The occupants, Sir Edward Fanshawe and his camping party, including a young mother and child, are soon fighting a losing battle in the dark. "Oh God, I'm up to my waist in rats. I'm being eaten alive!" Patricia Highsmith - The Bravest Little Rat In Venice: The vicious Mangoni boys capture and torture the rat, blinding it in one eye and cutting off two of it's legs. The rat escapes into the canal and we follow it's adventures until, several months and many scrapes later, it arrives back at the Mangoni house - where the same little lads take it prisoner again. This time the plucky rodent gets loose in the house. While the family are out gallivanting, their baby-sitter makes a horrible discovery ... Stephen King - Graveyard Shift: Super giant rodent fun which nods at Henry Kuttner's timeless scream-fest The Graveyard Rats. Gates Fall, Maine. The underpaid, overworked employees at the decrepit hellhole of a mill are offered overtime to clear out the filthy, rat-infested ground floor over the holiday. Foreman Warwick is a bully who persecutes the entire workforce, although he reserves the bulk of his contempt on rootless drifter Hall who he despises as a "college boy". When Hall discovers a trapdoor leading to a forgotten sub-basement, he hits on a deliciously ghoulish plan to be rid of the bastard for good ..... James Jauncey - Borderline: Sewage worker Harry gets his hand trapped in a metal grid and the sluice gates are due to open. Lucky for him there are plenty of hungry rats around down there ... Terry Tapp - See How They Run: More fun on the farm. Cassie tells husband David to pop in on Mr. Moyce and pick up some traps as she’s found another mouse carcass in the kitchen. Of course, he forgets - not that it would’ve made much difference. while he’s out in the fields, the rodents converge on the house in their millions. The obvious comparison is James Herbert, but this is closer in spirit to Michael Annesley’s Not At Night classic, Rats. Angus Wilson - Animals Or Human Beings: Welsh Marches. Fraulien Partenkirchen’s parents pack their troublesome daughter off to Wales to take up the position of housekeeper to eccentric old Miss Ingelow. The old girl is a staunch anti-vivisectionist and devotes her life to adopting the unfortunate creatures destined for the laboratory. The Fraulien decides she doesn’t like pets - not when they’re huge buck rats, anyway - and resigns just in time to avoid witnessing Miss Ingelow’s grisly death. Richard Laymon - Bad News: "A rat-like, snouted face poked out of the middle of the folds. Furless, with white skin that looked oily. It gazed up at him with pink eyes. It bared its teeth."Paul gets more than he bargained for when he retrieves his copy of The Messenger from the lawn. Soon the entire community is under attack from the unrelenting flesh-eaters. Paul screams for his wife to get help from despised neighbour Joe Applegate, far right Republican, as he's got a complete f**k**g arsenal at his disposal, not that it's done him any good ... Brilliant "Rivals of the Rats" entry from the nihilistic Mr. Laymon. Oh, that poor cat ..... Henry Slesar - The Rats Of Dr. Picard: Dr. Picard of the Fierstmyer Institute brings 45 lab rats home so he can conduct some extracurricular research. His wife Violet takes exception and, inspired by her Animal Rights activist friend Mrs. Springer, hatches a plot to release them. They're very hungry ... Mary Danby - The Secret Ones: Adventures of three resilient rats - husband, wife and wife’s sister - who make home in the attic of a family mourning the death of their little daughter … R. Chetwynd-Hayes - No One Lived There: A traveller explores a deserted house in Devon. From a half-chewed manuscript scattered about the place, he learns that It’s occupants were German, occult dabblers, entirely out of sympathy with Hitler and that they seem to have abandoned the house in a hurry when the Nazi’s came to power. On the wall hangs a swastika (the non-tilted original) and gracing the mantelpiece, a framed photograph of a man and his son with a naked beauty stood proudly between them. As the traveller tries to make sense of it all, the rats drift in. One of them, he notes, has miniature female breasts not unlike those in the photograph. Cornered in a room with the rodent army chewing down the door, he spends his final moments writing about what he’s experienced. Jesse Stuart - The Red Rats Of Plum Fork: greenwood County, Kentucky. Nothing will shift the plague of rats overrunning Pa's farm; even a ferret comes out of a scrap with them eyeless and bloodied. Son Finn inadvertently hits on a solution to the problem. More whimsical than horrific and not my thing however well written. Warden Ledge - Legion Of Evil: "My God! 'Gunner', they're killing for the sake of killing." When magistrate Jack Bairdsly evicts the old hag 'Madge', a reputed witch, from her hovel in Long Woods, she wreaks bloody vengeance with the help of an army of blood-lusting ... stoats. First they attack the stable and then - with Jack, his brother-in-law, the grooms and all the horses down - they move on to the house, where Mrs. Bairdsley is sleeping ... Harry E. Turner - The Tunisian Talking Ferret: Set in a grim bazaar in the Casbah, this has everything that is good about a pulp horror story - an evil dwarf-cum-mad surgeon, scientifically dubious brain transplants (Roger is so right about this being "Bassett Morgan territory") and several murders. The real horror is in Turner's graphic depiction of the squalor and abject hopelessness of the beggars locked into the ungovernable few miles of fetid, sweltering slum. "Nearby a donkey hee-hawed and emptied its bowels into the street". More to follow, most likely. Haven't even mentioned Robert Bloch yet, and he's often good for some vicious vermin thrills. Then there's Lovecraft, M. R. James, Basil Copper ....
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Post by dem bones on Jul 9, 2010 8:04:22 GMT
"Rats in Paradise/ Over the side I'm bailing out!" - Nick Cave Robert Bloch - Water's Edge: Rusty Connors learns the vague whereabouts of the wage snatch haul from cellmate Mike Krauss who perpetrated the robbery. On his release two years later - Mike having died a Rusty-assisted death in the meantime - Connors makes straight for Mike's widow, Helen with a view to entering into partnership to locate the money. Maybe he'll even grab himself some hanky panky in the meantime as Mike was forever bragging about his gorgeous, "tall blond, but stacked" love-machine. But Helen now works in a diner and when Connors sets eyes on this dumpy, straggly haired slob of a woman, he can only hope that Krauss didn't exaggerate everything else. Much to Connors' disgust, Mrs. Krauss is up for love action but he forces himself to suffer her embrace for the sake of the fortune. Once he has his hands on that, man, she's history! Eventually they locate the strong box (and a gleaming skeleton) to the rat-infested attic of a decrepit boathouse. Now all Connors has to do is dispose of the loathsome fatso and it's flash cars and big-titted broads from here on in! Except Helen has anticipated him and gets her surprise attack in first! For her, after two years extreme method acting, she can finally go back to being a "tall blond, but stacked", only this time a rich one. For him. Well, Rusty doesn't have anything pleasant to look forward to at all unless he can somehow free his hands and smash her face in .... The hungry rats patiently await developments ... George Fielding Eliot - The Copper Bowl: "God! What a position! Either betray his flag, his regiment, betray his comrades to their deaths - or see his Lily butchered before his eyes!" That's the unenviable dilemma facing brave Lieutenant Andre Fournet of the French Foreign Legion. He's endured all the tortures the evil Wong can inflict upon him without revealing the location and strength of his colleagues on the Mephong River so now the even more evil mad mandarin Yuan Li has a crack at breaking his resolve. With Andre held secure, Yaun Li summons his guards who lead in the innocent Lily, some heavy duty bondage equipment, a copper bowl and a nice, mangy grey rat .... Plenty comment about this one on original Pan Book Of Horror thread. Basil Copper - The Recompensing Of Albano Pizar: A similar dilemma to the one faced by Harry in James Jauncey's Borderline (previous post). Corpulent Literary agent Pizar betrays the hospitality of Mme Freitas by stealing a folder of love letters written by her late husband. To add insult to injury, these steamy billet-doux are addressed to a mistress from early in their marriage. Soon the contents are splashed across the scandal sheets and the Palazzo Tortini is besieged by reporters eager for an interview with the widow. Together with her loyal friend Dr. Marizanares, Mme Freitas plans a grisly vengeance. Pizar finds himself manacled by a wrist in the vaults far beneath the Palazzo. If the sewer-rats don't eat him alive first, the incoming tide will surely drown him unless he makes good use of the razor-sharp cleaver they've thoughtfully provided for his "protection" .... M. R. James - Rats: Young Mr. Thomson, Cambridge University student, takes a room at a remote Suffolk coastal inn to catch up on his reading. During his stay, his curiosity regarding the locked room opposite gets the better of him. A peek inside reveals a human shape writhing beneath a top sheet - Mr. Thomson has not the inclination to draw back that sheet. On the final day of his stay, Thomson pays the room one final surreptitious visit. This time the inhabitant is up and about, but he's in bad shape - in fact, the nosey young man at first mistakes him for a scarecrow. And what's with the metal collar around his broken neck? Innkeeper Betts confides the local legend of his predecessor who fell foul of the locals on account of his consorting with highwaymen. Seems weird including the master of the antiquarian ghost story among such company, esteemed though it be, but Rats is not only a proper skincrawler but incredibly, far more explicitly gruesome than Robert Bloch's Water's Edge. For MRJ's torture-porn excursion, see Lost Hearts. Ripper suggested: "George G. Toudouze - Three Skeleton Key: The occupants of a lighthouse on a small island off the coast of Africa are besieged by thousands of rats from a beached ship." a longer synopsis and details of a lovable old time radio version of the story on the Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers thread.
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Post by Swampirella on Jan 21, 2020 16:18:52 GMT
"Rats in Paradise/ Over the side I'm bailing out!" - Nick Cave Robert Bloch - Water's Edge: Rusty Connors learns the vague whereabouts of the wage snatch haul from cellmate Mike Krauss who perpetrated the robbery. On his release two years later - Mike having died a Rusty-assisted death in the meantime - Connors makes straight for Mike's widow, Helen with a view to entering into partnership to locate the money. Maybe he'll even grab himself some hanky panky in the meantime as Mike was forever bragging about his gorgeous, "tall blond, but stacked" love-machine. But Helen now works in a diner and when Connors sets eyes on this dumpy, straggly haired slob of a woman, he can only hope that Krauss didn't exaggerate everything else. Much to Connors' disgust, Mrs. Krauss is up for love action but he forces himself to suffer her embrace for the sake of the fortune. Once he has his hands on that, man, she's history! Eventually they locate the strong box (and a gleaming skeleton) to the rat-infested attic of a decrepit boathouse. Now all Connors has to do is dispose of the loathsome fatso and it's flash cars and big-titted broads from here on in! Except Helen has anticipated him and gets her surprise attack in first! For her, after two years extreme method acting, she can finally go back to being a "tall blond, but stacked", only this time a rich one. For him. Well, Rusty doesn't have anything pleasant to look forward to at all unless he can somehow free his hands and smash her face in .... The hungry rats patiently await developments ... George Fielding Eliot - The Copper Bowl: "God! What a position! Either betray his flag, his regiment, betray his comrades to their deaths - or see his Lily butchered before his eyes!" That's the unenviable dilemma facing brave Lieutenant Andre Fournet of the French Foreign Legion. He's endured all the tortures the evil Wong can inflict upon him without revealing the location and strength of his colleagues on the Mephong River so now the even more evil mad mandarin Yuan Li has a crack at breaking his resolve. With Andre held secure, Yaun Li summons his guards who lead in the innocent Lily, some heavy duty bondage equipment, a copper bowl and a nice, mangy grey rat .... Plenty comment about this one on original Pan Book Of Horror thread. Basil Copper - The Recompensing Of Albano Pizar: A similar dilemma to the one faced by Harry in James Jauncey's Borderline (previous post). Corpulent Literary agent Pizar betrays the hospitality of Mme Freitas by stealing a folder of love letters written by her late husband. To add insult to injury, these steamy billet-doux are addressed to a mistress from early in their marriage. Soon the contents are splashed across the scandal sheets and the Palazzo Tortini is besieged by reporters eager for an interview with the widow. Together with her loyal friend Dr. Marizanares, Mme Freitas plans a grisly vengeance. Pizar finds himself manacled by a wrist in the vaults far beneath the Palazzo. If the sewer-rats don't eat him alive first, the incoming tide will surely drown him unless he makes good use of the razor-sharp cleaver they've thoughtfully provided for his "protection" .... M. R. James - Rats: Young Mr. Thomson, Cambridge University student, takes a room at a remote Suffolk coastal inn to catch up on his reading. During his stay, his curiosity regarding the locked room opposite gets the better of him. A peek inside reveals a human shape writhing beneath a top sheet - Mr. Thomson has not the inclination to draw back that sheet. On the final day of his stay, Thomson pays the room one final surreptitious visit. This time the inhabitant is up and about, but he's in bad shape - in fact, the nosey young man at first mistakes him for a scarecrow. And what's with the metal collar around his broken neck? Innkeeper Betts confides the local legend of his predecessor who fell foul of the locals on account of his consorting with highwaymen. Seems weird including the master of the antiquarian ghost story among such company, esteemed though it be, but Rats is not only a proper skincrawler but incredibly, far more explicitly gruesome than Robert Bloch's Water's Edge. For MRJ's torture-porn excursion, see Lost Hearts. Ripper suggested: "George G. Toudouze - Three Skeleton Key: The occupants of a lighthouse on a small island off the coast of Africa are besieged by thousands of rats from a beached ship." a longer synopsis and details of a lovable old time radio version of the story on the Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers thread. The Tip - Alan J. Onions (London Mystery Review June 1957) Old Stebbings traps rats for P.A.T. Biological, who pay him 3p per rat. But the winter of 1947 was bad and Stebbings was feeling his age. One Friday night he decides that weekend will be his last. It will, and sooner than he thinks. The ending's completely predictable but it's worth reading at only 2.5 pages. |
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Post by dem bones on Jan 21, 2020 18:05:05 GMT
The Tip - Alan J. Onions (London Mystery Review June 1957) Old Stebbings traps rats for P.A.T. Biological, who pay him 3p per rat. But the winter of 1947 was bad and Stebbings was feeling his age. One Friday night he decides that weekend will be his last. It will, and sooner than he thinks. The ending's completely predictable but it's worth reading at only 2.5 pages. The name sounded familiar, and then I realised we included The Tip on the Advent Calendar for 2017.  |
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Post by bluetomb on Jan 21, 2020 19:00:28 GMT
H.p. Lovecraft - The Dreams in the Witch House. Penniless student is plagued by a witch, her human faced rodent familiar and higher level mathematics. It's been a long time so memories have largely escaped me, but I rated it Lovecraft's creepiest along with The Colour Out of Space, and little Brown Jenkin sure gets a-nibbling and a-scurrying.
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Post by helrunar on Jan 21, 2020 19:41:49 GMT
Dreams in the Witch-House is really marvelous. I re-read it a year or so ago and still found it wonderfully atmospheric, creepy, and outright bizarre. The evil rat familiar is very scary and has quite a personality. I think rats may have run a close second to fish among things HPL found extremely repulsive... think of The Rats in the Walls.
H.
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Post by andydecker on Jan 21, 2020 19:59:15 GMT
Dreams in the Witch-House is really marvelous. I re-read it a year or so ago and still found it wonderfully atmospheric, creepy, and outright bizarre. The evil rat familiar is very scary and has quite a personality. I think rats may have run a close second to fish among things HPL found extremely repulsive... think of The Rats in the Walls. H. You should read the Alan Moore version in his comic Providence, issue 5, one of the best realized of the 12 issues. :-) Aptly called "In the walls". It is imho spot-on, and Brown Jenkin it absolutly reprehensible on the page. It plays with the distortion of time and space and messes with the head of the hero. |
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Post by helrunar on Jan 21, 2020 20:05:00 GMT
Hi Andreas, I did read Providence but don't recall that specific issue. The book was a mixed bag for me. I was so disappointed by the penultimate issue that I couldn't make myself purchase the final installment.
I also thought Promethea went downhill rapidly after the spectacular, long Tree of Life segment... I did read all the way through to the end of that just to see where he went with it.
He says he has retired but I doubt this... how does a creative person "retire"? I'll spare you the inevitable ranting that might follow about the painful, ridiculous and often damaging narrative of "retirement" in our culture. Nobody wants to read it anyway.
Prosit Neujahr! (belatedly)
Steve
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Post by andydecker on Jan 21, 2020 20:39:41 GMT
Prosit Neujahr!
Frankly I am on fence about the conclusion of Providence. I can't remember the end of a Moore tale I really liked or didn't thought lame, maybe with the exception of Neonomicon.
I would rate the last two issues as kind of brave, thoroughly defying the expectations of genre-fans. Which is always a good thing if the writer can pull it of. Normaly I have come to loath the inclusion of Lovecraft as a character, it has been done to death and has gotten bloody awful and lazy writing. But here it was kind of logical, not only as the meta element of the whole thing. The removal of the clueless hero didn't felt right, though. It was an anti-climax and too meta - I can't describe it better.
But all faults aside, from a technical viewpoint the whole thing is a masterwork. Both in writing as in art. Have you read the annotations? Facts in the Case of Alan Moore's Providence? A treasure trove of information. Unblievable what here is on the page. On the other hand I can understand the critique that this kind of work is at best a useless and empty excercise.
I still have not read Prometha. I bought it as a trade, couldn't get into it, even if I adored the art. Then I sold the trades and bought it digital at half price, which in this case makes the reading much easier and highlights the art. The digital, not the half price. It is not a comic one just can't browse,so it needs time and must be read in one sitting, I guess.
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Post by bluetomb on Jan 22, 2020 0:54:30 GMT
Dreams in the Witch-House is really marvelous. I re-read it a year or so ago and still found it wonderfully atmospheric, creepy, and outright bizarre. The evil rat familiar is very scary and has quite a personality. I think rats may have run a close second to fish among things HPL found extremely repulsive... think of The Rats in the Walls. H. Thinking on it I actually only have the broadest brushes of memory of almost any HPL story. Definitely read most though, just not since the early 00's. The Grafton paperbacks with awesome/silly lurid cover art. So other than the name not much comes to mind for The Rats in the Walls. Have been meaning to refresh myself on HPL though. See how his own work works for me nowadays. |
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Post by Knygathin on Jan 22, 2020 8:18:24 GMT
That illustration up in the first post is really too much! OH, THE HORROR!
Makes it all the worse thinking about how that scene must have happened at least on a few occasions in real life.
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Post by humgoo on Jun 7, 2021 4:41:29 GMT
Frederick Cowles - Three Shall Meet ( The Taste of Fear, 1976): Cowles does Gothic. Boulderstone Moor. 1765. How do you settle the score with your half-brother if he runs away with the only woman you love and punch you in the face as a parting gift? Obviously, on the tenth anniversary of the elopement, you have to invite him back to the family grange on the pretence that you're seriously ill and want a reconciliation. And then drug him, and then carry him to the secret chamber built by an evil ancestor centuries ago, where hundreds of hungry mice are awaiting. Will everything go to plan? Terry Tapp - Heads and Tails ( Nightmares 2, 1984): Brother and sister catch rats in the sewer in order to survive. A children's story. Elliott O'Donnell - The Curse of the Mouse Tower (from Famous Curses, 1929):
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Post by Swampirella on Jun 7, 2021 11:03:17 GMT
Elliott O'Donnell - The Curse of the Mouse Tower (from Famous Curses, 1929): I remember being very impressed/horrified with "The Curse" as a pre-teen. My parents really should have kept an eye on my reading.... |
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Post by dem bones on Jun 7, 2021 12:29:56 GMT
Ra Goli - The Pied Piper of Essex: (Andrew Garvey & David Saunderson [eds.] - The Spooky Isles Book of Horror, Dark Sheep, 2018). Properly horrible proper horror, inspired by a much travelled urban legend concerning the bloody revenge of a reanimated rough sleeper murdered for kicks. It really got to me, as did accompanying essay.
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Post by andydecker on Jun 7, 2021 18:01:14 GMT
I am truly sorry, but these rats look more like hamsters or naked mole-rats like Rufus  Have no fear, they just want to cuddle. |
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Have no fear, they just want to cuddle.