R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Fontana Ghost 11

[dem]

R. Chetwynd-Hayes (ed.) - The 11th Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories (1975)

Introduction - R. Chetwynd-Hayes

'The Gibsons' - Justice
Virginia Swain - Aunt Cassie
Algernon Blackwood - The Woman's Ghost Story
G. A. Minto - The Ghost Of U 65
Robert Arthur - Footsteps Invisible
Ambrose Bierce - Night-Doings At Deadman's
Margaret Irwin - The Earlier Service
Dorothy K. Haynes - Scots Wha Ha'e
G. B. S. - The Whittakers Ghost
Roger Malisson - Lady Celia's Mirror
Thomas Burke - The Lonely Inn
A. M. Burrage - The Green Scarf
Alan Griff - The House Of Desolation
Sydney J. Bounds - The Man In The Mirror
Pamela Vincent - The Attic
Peter Hackett - The Woman In Black
Oliver La Farge - Haunted Ground
Roger F. Dunkley - The Man Who Sold Ghosts
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Matthew And Luke

‘The Gibsons‘ - Justice: From my, admittedly limited, reading I gather that the short-short story is widely held to be the most difficult to pull off. In this grim 200-worder, Abel finds himself lost on an open moor with no idea how he got there. He’s not frightened as, being a God-fearing man, he knows that, if there’s any justice, the forces of evil can’t harm him …

Virginia Swain - Aunt Cassie: The old girl has lived with nephew Edward Alden and his family for twelve years, an absolute dear but with one grating habit - she will insist on seeing the ghosts of her dead at inopportune moments and passing on their (usually critical) observations. When she upsets his wife and daughter with some alarming faux pas, even Edward thinks maybe it's time she made other arrangements. Besides, one of the spooks keeps going on about his drinking. But he has a business arrangement tonight and the roads are icy. Best be very careful, especially as he knows the brakes to be faulty. Best have another shot of whiskey to keep off the chill ....

Robert Arthur - Footsteps Invisible: Times Square. Blind newspaper vendor Jorman has a highly developed sense of hearing and can identify people by their footsteps. One rainy night he gets talking to the English archaeologist Sir Andrew Carraden, a man with a guilty secret from his time in Egypt excavating the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Tothet. The ghastly guardian has pursued him relentlessly across the globe and he’s seen what it can do to a guard dog ….

Sydney J. Bounds - The Man In The Mirror: "A haunted chess set? That's a good one!" Doug Hone, mouthy Londoner (there is no other type if horror fiction is anything to go by), fancies himself as a chess wizard. Driving down to Somerset on his holidays, he stops off at a village pub, The Castle, and is delighted to find that the locals' favoured in-house entertainment is chess. Having trounced all comers, he alienates them further by going on about how much better everything is in the capital. Then he spots a set of beautifully carved pieces. These belonged to the late club champion, Thomas "Old Stew" Stewart, whose ghost haunts the pub and is still partial to a game after closing time ...

Pamela Vincent - The Attic: Frank inherits the old house on his aunt's death. His fiancee Sybil is uneasy about the place, particularly the attic which she detests and fears on first sight. In her nightmares, she sees a figure in shadow swinging from a beam ...

Peter Hackett - The Woman In Black: Jeffrey Layne , commuting home from Fenchurch Street to Southend, awakens from his nap to find a waxwork-like woman in widows weeds sitting across from him in the carriage. Ruffled, he tries to engage his fellow passenger in conversation but the only words he gets from her are the hardly reassuring "He ... lost .... his ... head." And then she vanishes.
Badly shaken, he abandons his journey at Chalkwell Station where the ticket collector offers tea, sympathy and the tragic history of Clara Bowman ...

Oliver Le Farge - Haunted Ground: Sue, the only woman he ever loved, is dead, shot in the first burglary Quonochaug has known in twenty years. Bloody typical! George Waterson, distraught, takes his boat out to sea and writes it off, but it doesn't kill him. Instead he's washed up on the stretch of beach known locally as 'Haunted Ground' on account of its reputation as the dead folk's hang out. He visits Sue's mother to view his beloved in her coffin.

Roger Malisson - Lady Celia's Mirror: Kings Road, Chelsea. Gay antiques dealers Jed Jardine and Bertie Thompson acquire a magnificent rosewood mirror in a mansion-clearance. Bertie gets a dreadful shock when he glimpses a malicious looking old woman leering at him from the glass but Jed sees nothing and the pair have a tiff. They decide to sell it and Laurence, their hairdresser friend, snaps it up for his new Mayfair salon. When a pretty young stylist is murdered on the premises, Bertie determines to learn the history of the accursed mirror.
'Camp black comedy' is probably the phrase I'm groping for. Pop culture references: The Beatles and the Sunday scandal sheet The News Of The People ("Priory Sex Murder Shock Probe - Naked Monk Found Strangled").

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Matthew And Luke: High-flying office worker Matthew Bayswater almost drowns in a swimming accident. Fortunately a passer by is on hand to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation, but the seven minutes he spent 'dead' are all it takes for his doppelganger to get up and haunting. 'Luke' is the spectre of Matthew's dual self. As Matt went on to make something of his life, Matt screwed his up and finally committed suicide. The jokey tone - yet another know-it-all mother-in-law - takes an abrupt turn for the depressing in the final pages and a spook in swimming trunks is something of a novelty.

[Calenture]

Some more of my annoyingly brief pre-Vault writings, but I think I can help complete these at least, so Dem can continue reading his Partridge Family book. Hopefully they'll be added to.

The Ghost of U65 by G A Minto: Ghostly goings on aboard a jinxed German submarine is all I wrote for this one.

The Night-Doings at "Deadman's" by Ambrose Bierce: A curious piece about a recluse who waits each night in his log cabin for the ghost of a murdered Chinaman to emerge through the floor to try to reclaim his severed pig-tail. A surreal air is added by the intrusion of a stranger, muffled against the snow with a long coat, scarf and green goggles. Very weird, it works better than you'd expect. That was what I wrote way-back, though I think I recall panning this one. Maybe it just depends on the mood you're in whether you'll like it or not. Can't see it at the old place.

The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin: Jane Lacey is vaguely disturbed by the carvings in the medieval church where her father ministers. When a young man visits, collecting medieval "graffitti", she helps him, and learns a disturbing truth about the church's history. A very effective piece of writing.

Scots Wha Ha'e by Dorothy K Haynes: Brenda and Eric are pleased when her husband's work as a security guard takes them to Scotland and a real home - they've been on the housing list far too long at home. One night she is woken by a banging on the door and a plea for shelter from a hunted young woman. Until the woman learns that she is English. This story trades on the history of William Wallace, filmed recently (when I wrote this, natch) as "Braveheart".

The Whittakers Ghost by G.B.S: This one, which Chetwynd-Hayes found in an 1879 Argosy, is that old turkey, the ghost which wanders around with no more useful purpose than to warn of an impending death. Presumably G.B.S. was G B Shaw?

The Lonely Inn by Thomas Burke: Newly moved into a weekend cottage with their wives, Mac and his friend go wandering down a lane looking for a pub. The place they find is unwelcoming enough...especially to people of Scottish extraction. Another story trading on the war between the English and Scotch, betrayal and revenge.

The Green Scarf by Alfred McLelland Burrage: The author, who I learned from Dem is equally well know as "Ex-private X" and wrote the very chilly The Waxwork (see 5th Fontana Horror and Stories they Wouldn't Let Me Do On TV). Another story of betrayal, this time dating from the 17th century and the wars of the cavaliers and roundheads. An artist rents a few rooms in the middle of crumbling, deserted Wellingford Hall. A visiting friend finds a curious relic, the scarf of the title, which brings the past vividly into the present.

The House of Desolation Alan Griff. A group of visitors arrive at Neath's isolated country house - a glacial hall with mazelike corridors, surrounded by mist. Neath has always had an odd reputation, which he lives up to by appearing then hiding in the depths of the house when his guests arrive. Even before the death of his wife, he had been reclusive and strange. If only his wife had been able to bear him a child...

The Man Who Sold Ghosts by Roger F Dunkley: Like The Water Ghost os Harrowby Hall[/b] this one's so well-known it's probably become part of the collective unconscious and gives the lie to the belief that humourous supernatural stories are unpopular. Lord and Lady Snood are imprisoned in a state of emotional petrifaction in their chilly old castle, bored with each other and the lack of society and money in their lives. Then the salesman knocks at their door, and life will never be the same for them again. Neatly told, and now something of a favourite with anthologists in search of a little light relief.

[Johnlprobert]

During my recent holiday too much of the literary stuff had me aching for the kind of old paperback whose cover might depict, oh I don't know, an ugly old woman crawling out of a mirror - and along came Fontana 11 to answer my prayers!

It's far and away from the best in the series, but you have to applaud RCH in his attempt to cram 19 stories into 182 pages. Not all of them are winners - GA Minto's Ghost of U65 reads like a textbook on submarines that mentions ghostly happenings in passing, but Robert Arthur's Footsteps Invisible is a little gem reminiscent of Robert Bloch at his pulpiest with an Egyptian mummy out for revenge on the streets of New York. Lady Celia's Ghost by 'Roger Malisson' is one of the better stories as well, even if it does come to a halt just as it's getting going. Syd Bounds' Man in the Mirror should be reprinted in a UK Pub Horror Anthology. My absolute, absolute favourite in this one, however, is Roger F Dunkley's The Man Who Sold Ghosts - richly funny and a Great Ghost Story in all the right ways.

[dem]

I've had much the same feeling merely leafing through the contents lists of several post-1990 erotic horror/ vampire anthologies these past few days, Lord P. I'll bet they contain some brilliant stuff, but the line up's read like a who's who of authors whose work has left me numb in the past. Doubtless there's more than a touch of looking back through rose tinted spectacles involved, but the Fontana Ghosts & Horrors seem so much more like FUN.

11 maybe isn't the best of the RCH-edited ones, but it contains stories by four of my favourites from the RCH/ Mary Danby crowd. ashamed to admit, can't remember the Roger Dunkley story - that's tonight's bedtime read sorted - but I'm a fan of Roger Malisson' - there were easily enough of 'his' for a stand-alone collection but, sadly, it didn't happen. Same goes for the wonderful Syd J. Bounds. Pamela Vincent doesn't seem to have been quite so prolific but I always enjoyed her snappy horror and supernatural stories (especially Homicidal Maniac! in the first Frighteners book).

[dem]

Algernon Blackwood - The Woman's Ghost Story: One of Blackwood's bumper collections dragged so that it put me off reading him, but revisiting The Woman's Ghost Story reminded me of what i liked about him in the first place, even if it's hardly typical of his work. A ghost-hunting young Suffragette, spending the night alone in a London haunted house, gets more than she bargained for when the resident spectre materialises for a chat. At first she tries to escape him by fleeing into the next room, but it's no use - he can walk through walls. The miserable phantom explains that in life he was a misanthrope, driven insane by phantom demons who eventually frightened him to death. He's been trapped here these past ten years, longing for one of the several psychic investigators who visit to release him from torment. "What I want is sympathy. I want affection. I want love! .... Put your arms around me and kiss me, for the love of God!" I must remember that one in the afterlife.

Roger F. Dunkley - The Man Who Sold Ghosts: With their debts reaching astronomical proportions and only the stone deaf butler Tipton remaining of their staff, the aging Godfrey, ninth Earl of Snood and wife Lady Eleanor had conceded any hope of overtaking rival aristo's, the Gore-Pendelshaws. Enter an opportunistic salesman offering an extensive range of headless phantoms, chain-rattlers and indelible bloodstains, just the ticket to lure all those wealthy American tourists!

Dorothy K. Haynes - Scots Wha Ha'e: Eric, Brenda and little daughter Stephanie have left the Midlands for Scotland and an old house in the shadow of Castle Wynd. The one downside: Eric's security job keeps him away nights and that's when the quite little village comes alive. Dorothy's sleep is disturbed by rowdies, "youths, probably gangs with nothing better to do", yelling in unintelligible tongues, banging dustbin lids and setting fires. One night a bedraggled young woman arrives on her doorstep clearly in need of assistance, but when she hears Brenda's accent she recoils in disgust muttering something about "English swine". The next visitor is even more unnerving: an agitated, blood-stained fellow who claims to have killed a man. He detests the Sassenach's with even more venom than the previous caller. An explanation for these mysterious goings-on is provided when Stephanie returns from school one afternoon, excitedly talking mum through the day's history lesson on how Sir Robert the Bruce avenged his wife's murder.

Thomas Burke - The Lonely Inn: Two stranger's chance upon The White Cockade, a remote and supremely dismal pub hidden in the Derbyshire countryside, landlord uncommunicative, customers surly. After a time, both men are aware of the hushed whispers "that's him", and it seems these fellows recognise 'Mac' (on account of his being a Scot) and aren't the least pleased to see him. The following weekend, Mac visits The White Cockade alone. It's the last anyone ever sees of him or the pub which was burnt down 200 years ago. An old gardener and local history buff has a terrible tale of treachery and betrayal to relate.

[Craig Herbertson]

Feb 10, 2011 14:27:01 GMT dem said:

Algernon Blackwood - The Woman's Ghost Story: One of Blackwood's bumper collections dragged so that it put me off reading him, but revisiting The Woman's Ghost Story reminded me of what i liked about him in the first place, even if it's hardly typical of his work. A ghost-hunting young Suffragette, spending the night alone in a London haunted house, gets more than she bargained for when the resident spectre materialises for a chat. At first she tries to escape him by fleeing into the next room, but it's no use - he can walk through walls. The miserable phantom explains that in life he was a misanthrope, driven insane by phantom demons who eventually frightened him to death. He's been trapped here these past ten years, longing for one of the several psychic investigators who visit to release him from torment. "What I want is sympathy. I want affection. I want love! .... Put your arms around me and kiss me, for the love of God!" I must remember that one in the afterlife.

Roger F. Dunkley - The Man Who Sold Ghosts: With their debts reaching astronomical proportions and only the stone deaf butler Tipton remaining of their staff, the aging Godfrey, ninth Earl of Snood and wife Lady Eleanor had conceded any hope of overtaking rival aristo's, the Gore-Pendelshaws. Enter an opportunistic salesman offering an extensive range of headless phantoms, chain-rattlers and indelible bloodstains, just the ticket to lure all those wealthy American tourists!

Dorothy K. Haynes - Scots Wha Ha'e: Eric, Brenda and little daughter Stephanie have left the Midlands for Scotland and an old house in the shadow of Castle Wynd. The one downside: Eric's security job keeps him away nights and that's when the quite little village comes alive. Dorothy's sleep is disturbed by rowdies, "youths, probably gangs with nothing better to do", yelling in unintelligible tongues, banging dustbin lids and setting fires. One night a bedraggled young woman arrives on her doorstep clearly in need of assistance, but when she hears Brenda's accent she recoils in disgust muttering something about "English swine". The next visitor is even more unnerving: an agitated, blood-stained fellow who claims to have killed a man. He detests the Sassenach's with even more venom than the previous caller. An explanation for these mysterious goings-on is provided when Stephanie returns from school one afternoon, excitedly talking mum through the day's history lesson on how Sir Robert the Bruce avenged his wife's murder.

Thomas Burke - The Lonely Inn: Two stranger's chance upon The White Cockade, a remote and supremely dismal pub hidden in the Derbyshire countryside, landlord uncommunicative, customers surly. After a time, both men are aware of the hushed whispers "that's him", and it seems these fellows recognise 'Mac' (on account of his being a Scot) and aren't the least pleased to see him. The following weekend, Mac visits The White Cockade alone. It's the last anyone ever sees of him or the pub which was burnt down 200 years ago. An old gardener and local history buff has a terrible tale of treachery and betrayal to relate.

Yes Dem, I was in most of the ghost stories pursuing the sassenach in search of revenge for Culloden

[ripper]

Just looking through the contents of this one and 'The Woman in Black' caught my eye. I haven't read the story--don't have this volume--and I wondered if it was inspired by that old railway urban myth--at least I assume it is an urban myth.

[fritzmaitland]

Mar 23, 2008 10:11:04 GMT dem said:

‘The Gibsons‘ - Justice: From my, admittedly limited, reading I gather that the short-short story is widely held to be the most difficult to pull off. In this grim 200-worder, Abel finds himself lost on an open moor with no idea how he got there. He’s not frightened as, being a God-fearing man, he knows that, if there’s any justice, the forces of evil can’t harm him …

Heh. Enjoyed meself so much in October when a job lot of knackered to shit Pan Horrors with a couple of Font Ghosties came my way for not much money I thought I'd bet start getting ready for next year. Looking at FG11 I was quite enjoying RCW's sarky intro, almost in the 'I know these are cobblers, you know these are cobblers, let's enjoy them for what they are' mode, when I noticed 'the Gibsons' tale was all of half a page a la Eustace in Pan H 9. I intimated that might be to alleviate the prior horrors of the Green Mummy volume, and here, the same sort of thing is used as an amusing introduction to the (assumed) shivers to follow. Great!