Peter Cushing - Tales Of A Monster Hunter

[dem bones]

Peter Cushing & Peter Haining (eds.) - Tales Of A Monster Hunter, (Futura, 1978)

Peter Cushing - How I Became A Monster Hunter

Alexandre Dumas - The Masked Ball
Mary Shelley - The Mortal Immortal
Bram Stoker - Dracula's Guest
Josef Nesvadba - In The Footsteps Of The Abominable Snowman
Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle - The Ring Of Thoth
Gertrude Bacon - The Gorgon
Robert Bloch - The Man Who Collected Poe
Michael Arlen - The Ghoul Of Golders Green
James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness


Unusually generous (13 page) introductory essay from the great man, and a neat selection too. As with the various Christopher Lee compilations (see Haining, Parry), the idea was to collect stories featuring villains and monsters that the Cush had encountered during his glorious career. The Michael Arlen story has dated as badly as his The Gentleman From America hasn't, but full marks for reviving James Blish's extraordinary werewolf novella, while Robert Bloch's EC-like creation is always welcome.
The dedication "To Helen, Who is always with me", even brings a lump to the throat of the evil demonik, who isn't a great big fairy as everybody knows.

James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950):

"Perhaps God had decided that proper humans had made a muddle of running the world: had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night."

Fifty plus pages of pulp manna! There Shall Be No Darkness provided the basis for the slightly deranged Amicus shocker The Beast Must Die, though sadly you don't get the thirty second 'spot the werewolf' break until Subotsky got on the case: Loch Rannoch, Scotland. The Newcliffe's house party is enlivened considerably by the discovery that red eyed, hairy-palmed concert pianist Jan Jarmoskowski is a werewolf and must be destroyed. Round and round the estate they roam - Newcliffe, his wife Caroline, psychiatrist and werewolf expert Christian Lundgren, prying artist Paul Foote, Doris the fledgling witch, etc. - armed with their supply of DIY silver bullets. When one of the party is killed, Foote realises that there is a second werewolf among them. This may sound far-fetched but in this story lycanthrope is a highly contagious disease and all it takes is a mere scratch for the victim to become tainted. At the climax, Jarmoskowski gets to tell it from the man-wolf's point of view, and you have to concede they have a rotten time of it.

Gertrude Bacon - The Gorgon: Greek Islands. Pestered and probed by passenger Miss Baker, Captain Brander relates the story of how The Haslar once ran aground on Zante where he and Travis set out to explore a cavern shunned by local peasants on account of it being 'haunted'. Imagine the captain's horror when Travis is transformed into a black block of stone and he catches the snaky haired reflection of Medusa in a pool of water!

[dem bones]

A tragic love affair and an anti-film crews in peril story, neither of them quite 'horror' stories but both certainly macabre. If Peter Cushing selected this bunch, he had good taste.

Alexandre Dumas - The Masked Ball: Discovering that the man she loves has a mistress, a beautiful young woman gifts her virginity to Anthony, a complete stranger, for paying her a kindness. As the occasion is a masked ball, Anthony never gets to see her face. He spends six months searching for the mystery girl until finally Marie writes telling him where she can be found ....

Michael Arlen - The Ghoul Of Golders Green: Digging graves in dress clothes, and in the early hours of the morning, was hardly what Beau Maturin had in mind when he decided to play knight-errant to the young lady in distress. - The Mammoth Book Of Thrillers, Ghosts & Mysteries, 1936.

"The attacks of ten murderers cannot disfigure your person more violently than being left alone in a night-club will disfigure your reputation. Bulgarians may be violent, Miss Samsonoff, but lounge-lizards are low dogs."

Forty years after the Ripper murders, a new fiend stalks London, stacking up corpses from Hampstead Heath to Berkeley Square. A comedy policeman confides in a pair of Hooray Henry's that this new fiend differs from the last in that he preys on well-to-do young gentlemen, and while the newspapers have reported three victims, it is at least twelve to his knowledge, and counting. Making their way to a dubious nightclub, the toffs, Ralph Trevor and a very drunk Beau Maturin, come upon the inevitable fetching young woman weeping in an alley. Miss Samsonoff is a Bulgarian refugee, jealously guarding the formula for green carnations as perfected by her father before he was murdered by brigands. Those same killers have followed her to England, but she is far more fearful of her housekeeper, a ghastly crone who lives in the cellar and is evidently both phantom and homicidal maniac. Miss Samsonoff believes her to be the razor killer. Beau Maturin is smitten, but Trevor urges cautious and rightly so. On reaching Golders Green they find themselves at the centre of a conspiracy involving the girl, the mad woman, the cockney copper and three 'corpses,' but to what end? Have read this before - admittedly a long time ago - and still didn't see it coming ...

[dem bones]

It is not so long ago that to omit this next pair from your horror anthology was to commit a criminal offence.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - The Mortal Immortal. First published in The Keepsake for 1834, which was around the time I first read it. Sure feels like that, anyway. This Frankenstein- in - miniature is not especially scary but it is very easy on the brain. Winzy, a pauper, is bullied by his high-maintenance girlfriend, the fair Bertha, into accepting an apprenticeship under the man locally shunned as the devil incarnate, Cornelius Aggripa. When Cornelius finally perfects his elixir of life, Winzy gulps down half. The alchemist , catching him in the act, howls his disapproval causing Winzy to drop the glass. It shatters on the floor.

Their romance back on track, Winzy and Bertha are wed, but there's a problem. He doesn't age. Even as Bertha deteriorates, he remains fresh faced and full of vitality. Paralysed and bedridden, she dies an embittered hag, leaving her spouse to wonder if and when the effects of the elixir will wear off? Today, July 16th 1833, is his 323rd birthday. Death. It's the one thing we have going for us.

Bram Stoker - Dracula's Guest. Dropped from the novel in the editing process, indebted to Carmilla, fanatically recycled over several collections by P. Haining, etc. Munich, 189- . Its snowing, the wolves are howling, and there's a suicide buried at the crossroads. Despite the protestations of coach driver Johann who persistently reminds him that tonight is Walpurgisnacht, Jonathan Harker insists on interrupting their journey to explore an abandoned village. Presently he reaches a graveyard dominated by the marble tomb of Countess Dolingen of Styria - "sought and found death, 1801 - which has been run through with a spike. A flash of lightening illuminates the tomb. It's occupant stirs in her bier ...

Luckily a party of soldiers arrive to assist a delirious Harker on his way, having first seen off the huge white wolf nuzzling his throat. All this, and he's still hundreds of miles from his client's castle.

[ripper]

Bought this from one of those remainder book shops that flourished in the 80s purely on the strengths that it was cheap--25p I think--and Peter Cushing was on the cover. Probably my first exposure to PH as anthologist.

I've lost count of how many times Dracula's Guest has popped up in anthologies that I have read. I'm not sure why Stoker decided to remove the part that became Dracula's Guest from the novel--perhaps the publisher thought it was too long. I have always wondered if in the original novel--with the part that became Dracula's Guest intact--the events of Dracula's Guest were referred to in later passages of the novel after Harker had met Dracula in his castle. Also, has the original ever been published?

[dem bones]

Aug 18, 2014 8:25:14 GMT ripper said:

Bought this from one of those remainder book shops that flourished in the 80s purely on the strengths that it was cheap--25p I think--and Peter Cushing was on the cover. Probably my first exposure to PH as anthologist.

I've lost count of how many times Dracula's Guest has popped up in anthologies that I have read. I'm not sure why Stoker decided to remove the part that became Dracula's Guest from the novel--perhaps the publisher thought it was too long. I have always wondered if in the original novel--with the part that became Dracula's Guest intact--the events of Dracula's Guest were referred to in later passages of the novel after Harker had met Dracula in his castle. Also, has the original ever been published?

According to Florence Stoker, introducing Dracula's Guest & Other Weird Stories, "It was originally excised owing to the length of the book."

Robert Bloch's The Man Who Collected Poe is hardly underexposed either, but having already desecrated it elsewhere, will cut straight to a less familiar item. It's not what this reader would classify as "horror" (who cares?) but it's a jolly good romp.

Josef Nesvadba - In The Footsteps Of The Abominable Snowman. On expedition in the Himilayas, Big game hunter Lord Esdale, his formidable wife Helen and the cuckolded Prince Paul of L----- are set upon by a prehistoric tribe and whisked away to their mountain eyrie. The tribe, abominable snowman all, are Homines Sensuosi - "They have developed their senses further than any other animal" - and communicate telepathically. Gradually, the humans learn to do the same.

When Esdale announces he is returning to civilisation (i.e., Manchester), Helen, who has taken a snowman as her soul mate, refuses to accompany him. He arrives home just in time to learn that the collapse of the Stock exchange has done for all his business interests and he is effectively penniless. If only he could relocate the nomadic tribe!

"All at once I found my faith in reason had been betrayed; my factories were no more mine than Trafalgar Square. All my life I had believed in something that was nonsense... Human beings are dangerously capricious apes whom only their shameless arrogance has tried to make out the lords of creation. The yeti now appeared to me far more sensible the man. Even more furious blizzards and catastrophes were shaking our civilisation than those I had experienced in the Himalayas."

Helen sends him a message on the astral confirming they've now relocated to a cave in Santilane del Mar, where the fascists and anarchists are engaged in bloody conflict. By the time he fights his way to their cave, the elusive yeti have moved on.

When Nesvadba, who has been coerced by his wife and father-in-law into forging relics in ivory, is exposed as a fraud, he reluctantly agrees to accompany Lord Esdale on his last great adventure.

Incidentally, I believe the hardcover of Tales Of A Monster Hunter must include the stills referenced but absent from the paperback edition?

[dem bones]

Finally, Arthur Conan Doyle - The Ring Of Thoth: (The Cornhill Magazine, Jan. 1890). More elixir of life malarkey, this one set inside The Louvre during 1880s. When John Vansittart Smith falls asleep among the artefacts in the Egyptian room, the security staff are too negligent to notice and he's locked in for the night. Shortly after 1 a.m., Sosra, a "corpse-faced attendant," steals into the room and begins unravelling a perfectly preserved four thousand year old mummy. Atma is the girl he loved and lost many centuries ago but tonight she will be his!

[ripper]

I can see the connection that Peter Cushing has to all the stories except the Dumas one. Perhaps PC mentions it in the introduction, but sadly I don't have the book anymore.

[dem bones]

Aug 18, 2014 18:10:55 GMT ripper said:

I can see the connection that Peter Cushing has to all the stories except the Dumas one. Perhaps PC mentions it in the introduction, but sadly I don't have the book anymore.

Here we are.

"Although the stories in this book are mostly about monsters of one sort or another, it seems most appropriate to begin the collection with a tale by Alexandre Dumas who wrote the Man in The Iron Mask - the very first film in which I appeared. As all lovers of great literature will know, Dumas is an exuberant and colourful writer, and in the story here - which also deals with a masked figure - he mixes drama and jealousy with sinister effect."

Very true, and The Masked Ball gains an added poignancy when you think of how devoted Peter was to his late wife, Helen.

[ripper]

Thank you very much, Dem. I had forgotten about Man in the Iron Mask's connection to Peter Cushing. The Three Musketeers kept going through my mind but I couldn't think of any connection for that one to PC :-).

[dem bones]

Same content as above, retitled, recycled. Black swizzery, in other words.

Peter Cushing's Monster Movies (Robert Hale, 1994)

Signature Graphics

Blurb:
Peter Cushing has appeared in some of the most famous horror films of our times: as Baron Frankenstein, the maker of monsters, and as Dr Van Helslng, the sworn enemy of Dracula. Not to mention as the man who tracked the Abominable Snowman, battled wifh me ancient evil of The Mummy,and dared to face the terrible eyes of The Gorgon.
In this collection Peter Cushing has has selected a group of weird and macabre stories all linked to highlights of his screen career, and in a fascinating introduction explains some of the pleasures- and pitfalls! - that acting in horror films has given hlm over the years. The book ls illustrated with a selection of rare stills from some of his best-known movies.

[helrunar]

Lovely thread. I'm curious to know if Haining discussed various possible selections with Mr Cushing, who then made his choices, or if the latter wrote his own essay once Mr H had sent the MS of the tales along. One would presume the latter.

H.