Christopher Fowler - The Devil In Me

[dem bones]

Christopher Fowler - The Devil In Me (Serpents Tail: 2001, 2005)

Cover design: Wall

Foreword: Flare Guns

At Home In The Pubs Of Old London
Crocodile Lady
The Look
Rainy Day Boys
The Beacon
Come On Then, If You Think You're Hard Enough
The Torch Goes Out
Something For Your Monkey
Living Proof
Sex Monkeys
Eighteen And Over
Seven Dials

Includes:

A teacher lose one of her pupils somewhere in the London Underground. A catwalk model reveals the grisly secret of looking good. Slacker friends are forced into action over an accidental murder. A bomb's aftershock is felt fifty years later. Sex toys become instruments of fate. The suburbs are besieged, star scandals are revealed, epic tragedy turns to triumph and a cry for help flares briefly in the night ....

Black comedy, high farce, dark revelations ... they all go to make up Christopher Fowler's mind-blowing collection of immoral tales.

At Home In The Pubs Of Old London: The male lead takes us on a crawl around 13 of the capital's boozers, rating their attributes, amenities and eccentricities. I found him a knowledgeable, interesting tour guide but it seems the girls and guy he chats up don't share this view as they're always falling asleep in the corner shortly before he leaves ...

This one made one of the Year's Mammoth Best New Horror collections if I remember and it's a great opener with the added bonus that you can tick off how many of the pubs you've drank in as you go along (six in this case).

Sex Monkeys: Little did Torture Garden (?) regular Betty know the tragic sequence of events she'd set in motion when she gave John Chance a cock-ring to experiment with. Macabre sex comedy cum cautionary tale on the perils of trying to remove a rubber vest when pissed. Yeah, right: and you wouldn't have read this one first, I suppose?

Eighteen And Over: Fowler writes in his brief introduction to this one: "If I say I was annoyed by the ludicrous censorship laws in Britain, you'll get the picture." With Stephen Elly, teen director of Plague Of Terror, that annoyance spills over into direct and violent action as the 'Freedom Bomber'.

[franklinmarsh]

Justed started checking out CFs Psychoville. Young hero Billy is in the cinema watching a horror film. I can't help wondering if it's a real one - it seems like a cross between The Shining and The Devil Rides Out. We later find out that his Bermondsey-born, Elvis fan (with the quiff to prove it) dad saw a double bill of (The) Plague Of The Zombies/ Dracula, Prince Of Darkness circa '66. When the family are forced to move out of town, Billy runs away and heads straight for a cinema which will be turned into a bingo hall the following week. Due to the less than vigilant woman in the ticket booth, our lanky fourteen year old hero gets in to an OAP matinee of Death Line/ House Of Whipcord (with both Donald Pleasance and Pete(r) Walker namechecked.)
Viva El Fowler!

[dem bones]

My favourite so far is the two pronger in The Luxury Of Harm from the current Mammoth Best Horror.

"And through the mist I gradually discerned a slender figure, his head lolling slightly to one side, one arm lower than the other, like the skeleton in Aurora's 'Forgotten Prisoner' model kit, or the one that features on my copy of The Seventh Pan Book Of Horror Stories."

I like Chris plenty and the biggest bonus - he's as dead keen on these oldie anthologies as any of us!

[Craig Herbertson]

I'd forgotten about 'the forgotten prisoner'. Have we had a confessional here before? I had the werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula and the mummy but the forgotten prisoner was just the best glowing thing in my bedroom.

Craig

[David A. Riley]

I had the werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula and the mummy

I had these too, plus the Phantom of the Opera.

The mummy I bandaged over with fabric bandages, then painted matt to make it look more closely like the Hammer version. I think I succeeded pretty well, though all have long since passed into oblivion unfortunately.

David

[franklinmarsh]

I had The Creature From The Black Lagoon (bright green apart from his glow in the dark head, hands, feet and snake on a tree. My brother had the Phantom Of The Opera (Chaney) and Dracula (Lugosi). Drac met an untimely end when bro got an air rifle for Christmas

[franklinmarsh]

Back to Psychoville ( a devastating critique of surburbia, and the gap between the working and middle class), Billy reads Jack Finney's Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend as well as couple of more high-falutin' tomes (Although I'm sure it was Colin not Angus Wilson who came up with the Encyclopedia Of Murder). Carrie (the film) has been mentioned twice, and a throwaway line has Billy and his only school friend (the Funeral Director's son) wondering about The Exorcist - the film has been banned (this is 1985) but not the book.

[redbrain]

franklinmarsh said:

I had The Creature From The Black Lagoon (bright green apart from his glow in the dark head, hands, feet and snake on a tree. My brother had the Phantom Of The Opera (Chaney) and Dracula (Lugosi). Drac met an untimely end when bro got an air rifle for Christmas

I remember those - but never had any.

I now own a number of very fetching 54mm horror miniatures, though. (A man on EBay makes 'em and paints 'em.) They include most of the usual suspects (werewolf, Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc.) - and two different (rather fetching) Vampirella figures.

[redbrain]

This photo includes a few of the metal horror figures - and some of The Munsters.

[carolinec]

You're very brave to confess to playing with toys like these at your age, guys!
Seriously, I think it's great that adults can play like kids again; it's good when you reach your second or third childhood. I'm thoroughly enjoying mine, anyway!

By the way, I have some cute little plastic monsters from the late 60s/early 70s which I rediscovered in the attic a while ago. I wish I had the technology to share a picture of them with you - they're so sweet!

[redbrain]

carolinec said:

You're very brave to confess to playing with toys like these at your age, guys!
Seriously, I think it's great that adults can play like kids again; it's good when you reach your second or third childhood. I'm thoroughly enjoying mine, anyway!

By the way, I have some cute little plastic monsters from the late 60s/early 70s which I rediscovered in the attic a while ago. I wish I had the technology to share a picture of them with you - they're so sweet!

I think we all need to play. Too many people who don't play with toys play with other people. And you can play all sorts of scenarios (depending on which toys you have). To what use would Robin Hood and his Merry Men put a fork lift truck? You'll never know until you try it.

What you need in order to share a picture is a digital camera. I can borrow one of them, although I have no access to a scanner.

[Craig Herbertson]

Redbrain. If you die can I have all these please and any Fireball XLF miniatures you may have hidden away..

Again sorry for hijacking this thread franklinmarsh . I'd do a poll if I knew how. I just remembered I had the creature too. I can't imagine where I put them all. There must have been hardly any room for anything else. It seems the omission in my life was phantom of the opera which incredibly, I never owned.

I want to amrry the fellow who owns this site if he's still free

www.tylisaari.com/models/fp/forgotten.htm