Ramsey Campbell - New Terrors

[Nightmare]

Yeah. The tall buildings seemed a bit odd to me in City Fishing.

I see! (Tissue space between asterisks!)

[Calenture]

God, this was a great anthology. I remember it fondly from the days when I actually had time to read books.

Thanks ever so much for the kind words and for linking my write-up at Vault Mk. 1 at the start of this thread, Dem. First time I've seen that.

Bridal Suite, Tissue, Room With a Vie, The Stains, Watchers At the Strait Gate, City Fishing, Sun City, Time to Laugh - these are all stories that I haven't forgotten, years after reading them.

For what it's worth, my own take on City Fishing would be that this is another doom-laden projection of the future, in which Jimmy's father decides it's time to take Jimmy and Billy from the safety of the suburbs (where a crow can be caught) into what's left of the heart of the city, which now resembles Richard Neville's city in I Am Legend or Racoon City from Resident Evil.

As their journey takes them down into the city's rotting heart they enter an almost surreal land of closely-packed, dilapidated skyscrapers. Is it just a piece of crumbling masonry that hits their car, or are the inhabitant of this hell trying to defend themselves? The roads are potholed here. But the further they go into the city, the older the buildings - and thus the taller. Civilisation has definitely been set back by whatever happened here. Richard Neville is recalled to mind again by the "great iron or wooden doors." And everything is seen through the wide eyes of a child. People are burning coal or wood and "The smoke stacks were taller than anything he'd ever seen."

The tattered figures at the end... Zombies? Vampires? Luckless survivors of clouds of radioactive dust? Who knows?

But Jimmy and his dad will have fun killing them.

Steve Rasnic is one of the great underrated horror writers.

[dem]

Jul 5, 2013 16:23:06 GMT Calenture said:

Thanks ever so much for the kind words and for linking my write-up at Vault Mk. 1 at the start of this thread, Dem. First time I've seen that.

My pleasure. Am looking forward to revisiting it once i've worked through the first volume.

The note on City Fishing came out way more negative than was intended ....

Lisa Tuttle – Sun City: Nice 'n nasty. Meet Nora Theale, a hotel clerk working nights at the Pasada del Norde. Her estranged husband is leaning on her to sign the divorce papers. She has developed a morbid hatred of Mexicans. She's eaten up with guilt over her non-intervention when a girl was raped on the beach, and wants out of lousy El Paso the minute her lease expires.

As if that weren't enough to be getting along with, now Nora is persecuted in her own apartment by a deity with a skinning knife and particularly vile fashion sense. Xipes!

James Wade - The Pursuer: Shades of Thomas Burke's Johnson Looked Back. Narrator is hounded through the streets and bars of Chicago by silent man in brown hat and shabby raincoat. Nobody else seems to notice him,. Whatever can he want?

Ah! this next has stayed with me for years, but could recall neither author, title or place of publication (thought it was either a Shadows or a volume of KEW's Years Best Horror. Am dead pleased to have finally nailed it. And the story still packs an almighty wallop.

Peter Valentine Timlett – Without Rhyme or Reason: Miss Deborah Templeton applies for the position of housekeeper to fabulously wealthy Mrs. Bates, ten years retired from public life to devote her every waking hour to the garden, one flowerbed in particular. Mrs. Bates, 48, has neither forgotten or forgiven her husband's dereliction - he took up with some low-wattage bimbo of the 'if you've got it, flaunt it' school - and this, perhaps, explains her ambiguity toward younger women. Still, it's none of Miss Templeton's business: the work is easy, the pay good, and she has the luxury of sleeping in her very own four poster. Talk about landing on your feet!

Miss Templeton has yet to see her employer in anything other than a frayed jumper, jeans and Wellington boots, so it comes as a shock to discover several sets of micro lingerie in her washing basket. She learns from chatty bloke in the Village store that Mrs Bate's girls come and go so fast, he can barely keep track. Deborah is the seventh, and all of them lookers.

Miss Templeton grows increasingly concerned as to the fate of her predecessors.

Matters come to a head on Saturday evening when Mrs. Bates insists they dress for dinner.

[Nightmare]

I hope Ramsey gets a chance to read my review. It would be interesting to know his thoughts on it.

[ramseycampbell]

I didn't think the book was mediocre.

[dem]

*cough*

Kit Reed - Chicken Soup: Harry loves his mum, who dotes on him around the clock especially now Dad's dead (good). But then dad's old pal, Charles, comes sniffing around, inviting her on a date and stuff. There is a big SCENE. Harry demands she never see the creep again. Mum complies. Anything to keep her little boy happy!

Harry is all grown up and starting art college. Mum is proving a bit of an embarrassment, fussing after him like he was still in the infants, but it's all smoothed over once he agrees to stop seeing fellow student Marianne who - trust your mother on this - is no better than she should be.

We could be here for a very long time but fortunately, Harry next meets Coral, and is finally pushed to decide between the women in his life. One will have to go - permanently.

Another winner, lovely and ghoulish. Where are the stories I held such disdain for in fledgling dem days? There are a few likely candidates in vol 2, so looks like i am in on New Terrors for the long haul.

Mr. Ramsey, if you read this and don't mind me asking. Which of your anthologies are you most proud of, and, which was the most enjoyable to work on? Have there been any disappointments along the way?

[Michael Connolly]

I have a confession to make.  When New Terrors and Dark Forces were published in 1980 I was really only just discovering horror fiction. Despite appreciating M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft etc at time, I remember that (and I apologise in advance, Ramsey), I really loathed some of the stories in New Terrors and Dark Forces.  At this stage I can't remember which (and I have long since thrown New Terrors and Dark Forces out!).  As I liked, for example, Michael Shea's "The Autopsy" in The Dark Descent (1987), I would probably have a better understanding of New Terrors and Dark Forces now.

I hope I haven't started another fight.

[jamesdoig]

Surely Dark Forces is the best original anthology published - The Mist, Children of the Kingdom, The Brood, The Late Shift, Where Summer Ends are all classics. New Terrors somehow seems more experimental, but The Stains and The Ice Monkey are classics in my view - mind you I haven't read it for a couple of decades and can't remember most of the stories.

[andydecker]

You know, Michael, I dutifully bought New Terrors back then. It just was the thing to do after one read Dark Forces.

Today the only stories I remember of Dark Forces are King's The Mist and the ones by Wagner and Klein. Of Dark Forces I remember nothing. Akways wanted to re-read this, because a lot of stories I really only got to appreciate much later in life. Or not :-)

Some writers I just can't get into. Clive Barker is one of them. I recognize his influence, his voice. And still I have a hard time to finish his stories. Every few years I try The Books of Blood again, just a few weeks ago I took Vol.4 from the shelves after reading a nice new review of it. I got stuck again.   

[cauldronbrewer]

Jul 30, 2018 21:20:25 GMT jamesdoig said:

Surely Dark Forces is the best original anthology published - The Mist, Children of the Kingdom, The Brood, The Late Shift, Where Summer Ends are all classics.

No argument here. Klein's "Children of the Kingdom" is the high point for me, but I'm also partial to the stories by Wellman ("Owls Hoot in the Daytime") and Grubb ("The Crest of Thirty-six"). The inclusion of Gorey's "The Stupid Joke" is a nice touch, too.

[ropardoe]

Jul 30, 2018 21:30:53 GMT andydecker said:

Some writers I just can't get into. Clive Barker is one of them. I recognize his influence, his voice. And still I have a hard time to finish his stories. Every few years I try The Books of Blood again, just a few weeks ago I took Vol.4 from the shelves after reading a nice new review of it. I got stuck again.   

Yes, I agree with you on Clive Barker.  Just not to my taste.  I was once explaining this in detail to whoever I was sitting with at a Fantasycon (I'd just won a bundle of his books in the endless raffle), only to turn around and realise that the person sitting behind me was Clive Barker himself.  Talk about embarrassing!

[Michael Connolly]

I'm glad I didn't start a riot.  Again, I would probably change my mind if I re-read New Terrors and Dark Forces. While I can't remember most of the stories at all, I think that one from one of the anthologies has a scene where a character goes into an orchard and sees "testicular plums" on a tree. I can't forget that. And neither will you.

[weirdmonger]

THE STAINS by Robert Aickman

“Dr. Who?”

“And, judging by recent experience, the moment might even prove a noticeably long moment. Time might again stand still. Time sometimes did if one had not expected it.”

“That, after all, was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.”

…Aickman’s obsession, recently discovered in his other works and his editing, with Zeno’s Paradox and time’s battle with it? But here accretiveness finally wins?

The Stains is an increasingly marked and remarkable Aickman novelette, telling of the civil servant Stephen who has just lost his lifetime companion wife Elizabeth and meets, in a so-called “clough” on the moors, the beautiful, seemingly naively minded, waif-like, faded-clothed and virgin-breasted Nell on the moors near where he is staying with his vicar brother (a hobby student of lichens), and Nell takes Stephen to the du Maurier-like Pool where he becomes Hylas to her Nymph, or to her oread, or maenad, or sylph, to her “Knell” of Fate — or is it the apotheosis (“Rapture was beginning”) of his new life had it not been for this work’s accretive Mark Trembles, stains and patches and lichens and mosses that less and less civilly and with more of three-dimensions Thread increasingly the words as well as our reading brain, including the staining and marking of the solitary empty house (so reminiscent of one of the Houses of the Russians elsewhere in Aickman) where Stephen and Nell shack up as lovers, and marking his apartment or flat back in London, and his brother’s rectory walls and presumably the latter’s now sickly, once teatime obsessed wife Harriet, and upon Stephen’s own back, too, and driving glove fingers, even upon Elizabeth’s natural fibre bag.

Some marks like inhuman faces.

Nell’s backstory of father and sister nearby is ominous. Nell’s sole mark near her breast meanwhile accretively fades towards a “honied” purity. The meaning of this major novelette is also accretively found in its textual words’ and textures’ and stainy objects’ “conglomerate” — viz. “virtual void”; a map’s dividers; a bus journey where the passengers are explicitly social-distancing, the bus driver with a sick kid cancelling the bus journey altogether, then avoidance of The Waiting Room syndrome, a story by Aickman I happened to re-read and review yesterday*; what Nell found on Stephen’s roof in London; the stinging of Portuguese man-o’-wars; “a fungus and an alga living in a mutual beneficial relationship” (like otherwise separate works of fiction?); the music of Schumann that comes out of nowhere at the end; the stone oubliette where Nell and Stephen eventually shelter from her impinging father; and if I told you of any more, that would spoil it for you by putting things on your brain that you might not be able to get off.

“The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless.”

=========================================

*
THE WAITING ROOM by Robert Aickman

“Their love was like a magnifying glass between them.”

Like this story and its reader. A Northern railway waiting-room haunted by the burial ground upon which it is built has long waited for the late traveller who has missed trains and needs to spend the night here.
Uses “polypetalous” as a word.

Cf “Then passion began to open its petals within him, layer upon slow layer.” — from RINGING THE CHANGES in the same Dark Entries book that published the Waiting Room.

A burial ground means its travellers are no longer waiting, I guess.