The Curse

[justin]

Curse, Hamlyn, 1980, by Daniel Farson ("great-nephew of Bram Stoker)

60 pages and its a solid start but needs to start delivering the goods now...

When Dick, a day-dreamer impulsively purchases a pub on the Cornish coast, he finds himself in the middle of a clash between an American developer and the yokel-locals. Or the Horribles as they are known locally due the village being called Horracombe. Tensions are not helped when a number of the villagers begin to die in a horrible manner. All explainable as accidents, but their gruesome nature and number has the superstitous villagers in a tizz... the discovery of "skellingtons" dating back hundreds of years with their fingers missing does not bode well in their eyes.

More Straw Dogs than pulp horror so far, Farson is taking things at a leisurely pace. He does need to pick it up a bit, although his sly humour and portrayal of the Cornish villagers have made it an enjoyable enough read to date.

No sign of any hideous skeletal apparations holding lanterns to date. You'll be the first to know when they do turn up.

[dem]

Dec 1, 2008 20:38:14 GMT justin said:

When Dick, a day-dreamer impulsively purchases a pub on the Cornish coast ....

Surely not the bitchy chat show queen Dick Manley again, the unlucky recipient of a dead man's heart in the magnificent, should-have- been-a-NEL Transplant?

Please continue to suffer on our behalves, Justin, as this sounds excellent! I wonder if - or should that be how? - he'll work in some references to Bram Stoker, Soho and his Montague Druitt was Jack the Ripper theory in this one?

[justin]

Half-way through and this is getting bizarre. And not in a good way.

Farson is showing some srious inconsistencies- suddenly from out of nowehere he'll have Dick's daughter possessed, exorcised by the local priest who then tells of his many exoperiences with the occult without any of the character's batting an eye-lid. In the course of a few pages. Then he'll spend a whole sodding chapter detailing the town hall meeting between the developer and his local rival. Eight pages of technical discussion about land-fill, erosion etc just so one obtuse warning as to "meddlin' with forces you don't understand" can be muttered.

It's as if Farce-son wrote this as a 120 pager for NEL and when Hamlyn demanded double the word count he decided to increase it by dropping in his course-work for qualifying as a Chartered Surveyor.

No sign of his Transplant obsessions so far Dem. Although they would be quite welcome.

Top quote of the book so far. As a sweaty trawler-man lifts himself off his nubile lover and prepares for his post-coital snooze..... "Proper job."

[killercrab]

It's as if Farce-son wrote this as a 120 pager for NEL and when Hamlyn demanded double the word count he decided to increase it by dropping in his course-work for qualifying as a Chartered Surveyor. >>

Ha ha I've probably read worse padding. Proper job indeed.

[bushwick]

Just started reading this today. Will add my tuppen'orth as and when.

[justin]

I'm handing over the baton to you Bushwick- page 174 in Curse and I've had enough. Farson's endearing eccentricties are no longer rewarding enough to wade through this.

Went straight into Chandler's The Tribe. Lummee! It's like going from a stair-lift into the world's maddest rollercoaster. Three chapters in and there's more vomit-choked corpses and pots of brain stew than any three hundred pages of Farce-son!

[bushwick]

Hehe, I'm going to try and persevere with this one. Don't like not finishing books (last one I didn't finish was Ron Goulart's 'Gadget Man'...alright and that, just not my cuppa...).

Don't think this is a 'nasty' though...so far, I'd call it a 'quaint'.

[killercrab]

Youse guys not finishing books. Was a time a guy would wade through The Wood for years if necessary !

[dem]

They just don't have the same sense of dedication these days, KC. I'll glad of a second opinion on Curse because the gloriously unhinged Transplant promised great things of Mr. Farson. Colin Wilson mentions him in one of his Jack The Ripper books, something to the effect that when Farson took over the Watermans pub on the Isle of Dogs, his fondness for a fierce drink reached Shane McGowan proportions and he was never the same writer again. Not that i'd expect Mr. Wilson to recognise a great Hamlyn when he saw one, mind.

Watermans Boss Dan Is Dead

By Lee Servis (East London Advertiser, Dec 1997)

THE man who brought fame to an East End pub has died after losing his battle spinal cancer.

Dan Farson was a larger-than-life figure who became familiar face in the East End during the 1960s when he ran the Waterman's Arms on the Isle of Dogs. Under Dan's control the Waterman's was no ordinary pub.

The self-confessed celebrity snob's regulars included the likes of Shirley Bassey, Clint Eastwood, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, Judy Garland, Claudette Colbert, Frankie Howard, Francis Bacon, Jacques Tati, Joan Littlewood and Groucho Marx ... to name but a few.

The Waterman's was the place to go in the 60's and was the Ideal place for Farson, an alcoholic and homosexual to pick up men. Farson, who was also a TV journalist, set up home nearby the river in Narrow Street, Limehouse.

He was also a prime specimen of Soho at its height - the Soho of Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, John Minton, John Deakin and Jeffrey Barnard.

He bought the Waterman's Arms, in Saundersness Road, in 1962, with money left to him by his parents changed its name from the Newcastle Arms and said he was "drawn by the river." Lying late in bed in Narrow Streets on Saturdays he would hear the loudspeaker announcements from passing tourist boats. "And this is Limehouse, notorious for its haunts of vice and opium dens, and now the home of TV personality Dan Farson".

He wrote a book about Jack The Ripper and made a documentary about East End pub entertainment called Time Gentlemen Please!

Farson, a descendant of Dracula creator Bram Stoker, knew he was dying of cancer when his autobiography, Never A Normal Man, was published in March, just after his 70th birthday.

[pulphack]

not read this, but just wanted to share that i was round my mate paul's the other day, and the subject of DF came up - paul's mum and his late dad knew DF in the sixties and used to go to the Watermans a lot. it was a notorious hangout, and they rubbed shoulders with lots of media and gangster types. she also had a good chuckle over his lack of restraint about his sexuality, considering it was still (shamefully) illegal back then. yet - and this is odd considering how DF hammered it when he was alive - she didn't know he was related to Stoker!

i have to say, it sounds like his autobiography would beat his fiction hands down.

[dem]

Dec 7, 2008 20:48:33 GMT pulphack said:

this is odd considering how DF hammered it when he was alive - she didn't know he was related to Stoker!

Honestly, you make it sound as though he never stopped dining out on his big family connection ...

Dan photographed on the back cover of The Man Who Wrote Dracula (Michael Joseph, 1975). You can tell his great-uncle was a bit sinister just by looking into his eyes, can't you?

Farson's lengthy article, The Cult Of Dracula (Men Only, 1974), is reprinted in Peter Haining's delightful The Dracula Scrapbook (Nel, 1976) which also reproduces David Holloway's Vampires In The Family, a review of Man Who Wrote .. from The Daily Telegraph (November 1974).

Perhaps The Waterman's finest hour was when it was blown up by the IRA in The Long Good Friday.

[bushwick]

Well, I finished this a few days ago, and I quite enjoyed it on the whole. It's a pretty daft book. Lots of larger-than-life characters, no real 'nastiness' - there's a few deaths but they play out in a farcical kind of way. There's a 'major plot revelation' towards the end, which is completely obvious from the book's prologue, and the climax isn't a surprise in any way.

Lots of red herrings and unnecessary detail along the way, as documented by Justin. The swarthy gypsy boyfriend of the main character's daughter kills her in a fit of jealous rage, then dumps her out at sea. By the end of the book, we discover that the main character knows this has happened, but isn't that bothered! He's got a new bird, after all...who needs a daughter?

More ludicrous events: said daughter gets raped by a big powerful Cornish fisherman, but by the end is of course enjoying it, and leaves her boyfriend for him! Ten minutes later he calls it off, saying he can't leave his wife. Obviously, she's fine with all this. This scene should be deeply offensive, but in Farson's hands it just seems quaint and daft.

More like 'The Archers' than a horror novel. I can imagine this being filmed with the likes of Terry Thomas in starring roles, playing the village's 'characters'. Very camp indeed...

[dem]

Dec 14, 2008 12:15:33 GMT bushwick said:

There's a 'major plot revelation' towards the end, which is completely obvious from the book's prologue, and the climax isn't a surprise in any way.

I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but this sounds like my kind of book! I think i'm developing some kind of minor obsession with Farson's work. Has anyone read his "non-fiction" Jack The Ripper (Sphere, 1973)?

[fibre]

My first post.

Dick Truscott, his daughter Anne, and her boyfriend Harry have moved to the Cornish village of Horracombe, where they've taken over the running of local pub, the Prince Edward. The village is under a curse caused by the murdering in 1780 of the Spanish survivors of a shipwreck. The result is that in the present (that is, 1980), residents of the village are, every now and again, falling prey to fatal accidents: they fall off roofs, have strokes, things like that. If you've nodded off while you've been reading that, I can't blame you. This is one of the most dilatory, placid, and plain dull “horror” novels I've ever read. I can't help thinking that Daniel Farson, Bram Stoker's great-nephew, was having some sort of gigantic joke while writing this: a trio of main characters called Tom, Dick, and Harry – sorry: Anne, Dick, and Harry – might point to CURSE being not much more than a prank.

Farson provides definitive proof that it's simply not possible to write a horror story without an antagonist, for that is what he has (ambitiously?) attempted. Despite what's depicted on the front cover, there are no lantern-bearing walking skeletons, and the curse itself is so understated as to be non-existent; indeed, on the penultimate page, after the devastatingly underwhelming “climax,” our heroes take time out to mull over whether, just maybe, some sort of possibly supernatural curse may perhaps have have had something vaguely to do with the events which Farson has unfolded at leisurely pace over the preceding two hundred and forty pages. That's actually quite long for a Hamlyn horror from 1980, and CURSE could easily have been shorn of a hundred pages (or even more) from its threadbare plot. There's an awful lot about the daily activities of the running of the pub (hardly a surprise given the legendarily hard-drinking Farson once owned a watering-hole himself) including fascinating details like Dick's musings over sandwiches and floor-mopping, a whole chapter dedicated to a debate about the pros and cons of the finer details about the installation of a marina near Horracombe, and a quick demonic-possession scene which bafflingly fails to concern our heroes and is quickly disregarded. At the micro-level, there's nothing wrong with Farson's prose, but at the macro-level the story has a distressingly slipshod feel to it. Too much is either nugatory (Harry's murder of Anne) or shoehorned mechanically in to simply keep the crippled plot limping along (salvager Jack Robertson's appearance, the laughable stealing of Dick's car). 1/5.

cinematic-fibre.blogspot.co.uk

[pulphack]

Hello Mr Fibre - checked your blog and some great movie stuff on there. Welcome.