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Post by dem on Feb 1, 2008 8:53:41 GMT
Hugh Lamb (ed.) - Victorian Nightmares (W.H. Allen, 1977, Coronet, 1980)  Bob Haberfield
G. R. Sims - A Tragic Honeymoon
Morgan Robertson - The Battle of the Monsters
R. Murray Gilchrist - The Return
Dick Donovan - The Corpse Light
Frank Norris - The Ship That Saw a Ghost
Ambrose Bierce - A Bottomless Grave
Ambrose Bierce - One Summer Night
J. K. Bangs - Ghosts That Have Haunted Me
George Mandeville Fenn - Haunted by Spirits
J. Keightley Snowdon - A Ghost Slayer
Guy de Maupassant - The Tomb
Rhoda Broughton - The Man with the Nose
Dorothea Gerard - My Nightmare
Georgina C. Clark - A Life-watch
Richard Marsh - The Haunted Chair
W. Carlton Dawe - Coolies
Erckmann-Chatrian - The Three Souls
Guy Boothby - A Strange Goldfield
Robert Barr - An Alpine Divorce
E. and H. Heron - The Story of Baelbrow This was the collection that got me into reading, let alone reading horror stories and will always have a place in my heart. H. B. Marriott-Watson - The Devil of the Marsh: The narrator keeps his late night tryst with the beautiful lady of the marsh. Through the mist, he glimpses his predecessor, a skeletal, toad-like thing that once was a man before she drained the life from him. But still he wants her. It is only after he's watched his beloved gloatingly drown the wretch in the swamp that he comes to his senses. G. R. Sims - A Tragic Honeymoon : When he learns that the woman he loves is to marry another, the young man books a room in the London hotel where she and her husband will stay the night before setting off on honeymoon. Then he slits his throat. By chance, the happy couple are in the room below when his blood starts seeping through the ceiling ... Guy de Maupassant - The Tomb: Courbataille, a young lawyer, is apprehended in Bezier's cemetery one night as he removes his lover's corpse from her grave. Before an initially hostile court he tells how his anguish at never being able to see the beautiful twenty-year old again had driven him to it. Then he describes the condition of the rotting body he held in his arms ... Ambrose Bierce - One Summer Night: Henry Armstrong is a victim of premature burial. Lucky for him, within hours of being planted in the soil, two medical students hire big negro Jess the cemetery caretaker to dig him up to furnish their dissecting table. On second thoughts, maybe "lucky" isn't the right word ... Robert Barr - An Alpine Divorce: John Bodman and his wife are united in mutual loathing. He resolves to murder her, and books a vacation in the Swiss Alps with this in mind. He leads her up on Hanging Outlook and "a sheer drop of a mile straight down, and at the distant bottom ... ragged rocks." Mrs. Bodman has already guessed his intentions and has a nasty counter-revenge lined up for him. E. and H. Heron - The Story of Baelbrow: Baelness, East Anglia. The Swaffams' family mansion has been haunted for several generations. The present day owners are rather fond of their spook - until it turns malevolent and frightens a maid to death. Low discovers that the mansion was built on the site of an ancient barrow, and an evil spirit has animated a mummy brought home by one of the family. To make matters worse, the mummy displays classic vampire behaviour. Haunting terminated when Swaffam blows it's face off and the remains are set alight and cast adrift in a canoe. As far as I'm aware, A Bottomless Grave : and Other Victorian Tales of Terror (Dover, 2001) is identical to Victorian Nightmares in everything but cover - and probably a lot easier (and cheaper!) to get hold of these days.
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Post by redbrain on Feb 1, 2008 17:08:15 GMT
As far as I'm aware, A Bottomless Grave : and Other Victorian Tales of Terror (Dover, 2001) is identical to Victorian Nightmares in everything but cover - and probably a lot easier (and cheaper!) to get hold of these days. Not such a good cover, though  - and that must count for something. |
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Post by dem on Sept 22, 2010 18:55:51 GMT
Cover and blurb from Coronet, 1980 paperback edition  Cover design by David Cox Studios
From Scarborough to the South Seas, from wild moorland marshes to tranquil country gardens, the Victorian masters of nightmare return to chill us at the dead of night.
'A well-mixed bag for seekers after old-fashioned frissons' - Publishers Weekly
'These forgotten works rise above melodrama to the infinitely more terrifying psychological level.' - Eastern Daily News.R. Murray Gilchrist - The Return: "Make me thy lady! Make me the richest woman in England and I promise thee, Brian, we shall be the happiest of God's creatures." Sure enough, Brian leaves Derbyshire and goes diamond mining. The only snag is, this takes twenty years out of his life, but when he returns in triumph to Halkton Village, Rose Pascal, the love of his life, will still be only thirty-five. But where is she? Her home, The Pascal Arms has changed its name to The Lord Bishop since his departure, and his neighbours either don't recognise him or don't wish to. When he finds Rose's mother at prayer in the church, she greets him by suffering a fatal coronary on the spot. What can it all mean? But these mysterious incidents are forgotten when, at last, he holds Rose in his arms, even if she does look the worse for wear ... Richard Marsh - The Haunted Chair: Reading room of The Climax Gentleman's club, Pall Mall. Once he'd achieved ruin through his compulsive gambling, Geoff Fleming's old chums from school had a whip round and secured him a position on a Ceylon plantation to give him a fresh start. But even before he'd even reached his destination, Fleming allowed himself to get roped into a card game which saw him run up a debt to a party of Australians. The situation turned ugly but Fleming promised the men they'd get their money, even if he had to return from the grave to settle with them. His spectre thieves the cash from his friends and enemies back at The Climax Club. His nemesis, Colonel Lanyon, is foolish enough to try and throw the ghost out. Typical of the kind of work E. F. Bleiler would dismiss as "routine commercial fiction" which, i guess, it is - but that doesn't prevent The Haunted Chair from being a fun read. Rhoda Broughton - The Man With The Nose: As a child Elizabeth's parents took her to see a mesmerist perform in Penrith. Naturally, he demonstrated his skills on the little girl and she's been haunted by the experience ever since. Now honeymooning on the Rhine, she believes she has seen the tall dark man leering at her from the foot of her bed. When her husband is called away unexpectedly to attend a well loaded dying relative, Elizabeth is left at the mercy of ... the man with the extraordinarily prominent nose! When i first read this - must've been about sixteen - it gave me such a delicious thrill of horror that i've dreaded revisiting it for usual worry that it won't work its magic twice. Sadly, but for a brief episode in an art gallery which i'd completely forgotten, it hasn't but the Nose will always have a special place in my black plastic heart just the same. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Aug 1, 2013 17:26:16 GMT
This was the collection that got me into reading, let alone reading horror stories and will always have a place in my heart. That's quite an endorsement. I finally got around to reading this one (the cheap Dover edition), and so far it's been part familiar greats (Marriott-Watson's "The Devil of the Marsh"; Bierce's "A Bottomless Grave"; and the Herons' "The Story of Baelbrow"), part clunkers (Robertson's groan-inducing microscopic epic; Snowden's dialect-drenched and allegedly humorous tale; Dawe's period racism-heavy nautical yarn), and part revelations. Among the latter I'd certainly include the following: Rhoda Broughton - The Man With The Nose: As a child Elizabeth's parents took her to see a mesmerist perform in Penrith. Naturally, he demonstrated his skills on the little girl and she's been haunted by the experience ever since. Now honeymooning on the Rhine, she believes she has seen the tall dark man leering at her from the foot of her bed. When her husband is called away unexpectedly to attend a well loaded dying relative, Elizabeth is left at the mercy of ... the man with the extraordinarily prominent nose! When i first read this - must've been about sixteen - it gave me such a delicious thrill of horror that i've dreaded revisiting it for usual worry that it won't work its magic twice. Sadly, but for a brief episode in an art gallery which i'd completely forgotten, it hasn't but the Nose will always have a special place in my black plastic heart just the same. "The Man with the Nose" worked some magic for me in how it explained nothing while hinting at awful implications. Lamb's story notes compare it to E. F. Benson's "The Face" (my favorite story of his), and I can see his point. Other high points so far include Dick Donovan's "'The Corpse Light" (self-explanatory) Frank Norris's "The Ship That Saw a Ghost" (likewise), and Clark's "A Life-Watch" (in which a mysterious lodger does nothing year in, year out except for sit atop her only possession, a large chest which she never opens). |
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Post by dem on Aug 1, 2013 23:03:04 GMT
This was the collection that got me into reading, let alone reading horror stories and will always have a place in my heart. That's quite an endorsement. All true. Reading The Devil In The Marsh was the beginning of an addiction, affliction, obsession - call it what you will - that's seen me all the way through my adult life. You have to bear in mind that everything in Victorian Nightmares was new to me, and my response was 'this is the greatest book ever written!'. Afterwards, I took to haunting the local library, loaning any and every horror /supernatural title I could find, and there were LOADS of Haining titles available - the guy's work fair swamped the shelves at the time. The dirt cheap Fontana Ghost books were available in local newsagents, so money previously spent on comics went on them instead. No need to continue: the titles may change, but i'm sure all the regulars on this board have been there, which is very lovely when you think about it. So, bury me with my Victorian Nightmares (the Coronet paperback, 'cause that's the one that started it all)! |
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Post by ripper on May 26, 2014 11:58:40 GMT
I think I first came upon 'The Man with the Nose' in an anthology edited by Susan Hill. It inspired me to seek out more of Ms. Broughton's supernatural stories.
Dem, how did you come to read Victorian Nightmares all those years ago? I mean did you pick it up in a library or was it a gift or something?
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Post by dem on May 28, 2014 18:00:29 GMT
I think I first came upon 'The Man with the Nose' in an anthology edited by Susan Hill. It inspired me to seek out more of Ms. Broughton's supernatural stories. Dem, how did you come to read Victorian Nightmares all those years ago? I mean did you pick it up in a library or was it a gift or something? Got it from the library, rip. Think I borrowed Peter Haining's The Penny Dreadful at the same time. A couple of Fontana Ghost books later, and that was the adventure/ addiction well up and running. |
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Post by ripper on May 29, 2014 8:53:17 GMT
Thanks, Dem, that's very interesting. Were the Fontanas you used to borrow just the standard paperback editions? I ask because in the two libraries I used--and still do--there were no paperbacks stocked until the mid-1990s. I wondered if Fontana had issued special hardback versions that libraries stocked, though I have never come across any, nor do I remember our libraries stocking any Fontanas or Pans, sad to say.
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Post by dem on May 29, 2014 10:14:28 GMT
Thanks, Dem, that's very interesting. Were the Fontanas you used to borrow just the standard paperback editions? I ask because in the two libraries I used--and still do--there were no paperbacks stocked until the mid-1990s. I wondered if Fontana had issued special hardback versions that libraries stocked, though I have never come across any, nor do I remember our libraries stocking any Fontanas or Pans, sad to say. Yeah, paperbacks, in fact my battered copy of Fontana Horror 13 is stamped 'Withdrawn: Tower Hamlets Libraries. This was North and East London, late 'seventies/ early eighties: they'd stack paperbacks on these revolving racks; it's likely that's how I first got to read my first Pan Horror, too, unless it came from the newsagent. Proper libraries, mates, not glorified DVD rental outlets with doughnut counters. No wonder everyone except me is so f**k**g fat. |
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Post by ripper on May 29, 2014 18:30:20 GMT
In our libraries here in Staffs--or in the two I frequented--when paperbacks were belatedly introduced in the mid-90s they were separated from the hardbacks to a shelf of their own. It was only after a while that they were integrated into the main hardback stock. I am glad to say, however, that the libraries I still visit have not felt the need to offer food and drink to their borrowers. I was surprised a few months ago to go into one and find that there was now a self-service approach to taking out books; just scan your ticket and books without the need for a librarian to do it for you. I suppose it is all about saving money. It has come a long way since the librarian would issue you with 6 little cardboard envelopes and each book had a ticket inside.
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Post by ripper on Oct 7, 2014 9:50:49 GMT
I see that this one is now available on Kindle under its "A Bottomless Grave" incarnation. I hope that more of Hugh's anthologies from the 70s and 80s will be made available in digital editions, as I hope that would encourage more people to read this type of story.
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- and that must count for something.