L. A. Lewis - Tales Of The Grotesque

[dem]

L. A. Lewis - Tales Of The Grotesque: Uneasy Tales (Philip Allan, 1934)

Many thanks to Robert Weinberg for providing the cover scan.

Lost Keep, Hybrid, The Tower Of Moab, The Child, The Dirk, The Chords Of Chaos, The Meerschaum Pipe, Haunted Air, The Iron Swine, Animate In Death

"Squadron Leader Leslie Allin Lewis (1899-1961) was a veteran of both world wars, flying Sopwith Camels over France in 1918 and Hurricanes over England in 1940. He was also one of the best writers in the macabre and supernatural genre between wars. A collection of his unusual and excellent stories was published in 1934 under the title Tales Of The Grotesque.

From Richard Dalby's introduction to Haunted Air in The Mammoth Book Of Ghost Stories 2, 1977.

Officially a Creep, a modern edition, edited by Richard Dalby was published by the Ghost Story Press in 1994, and includes what seems to be L(eslie) A. Lewis's only other contribution to horror fiction, The Author's Tale - ghosts get down to some serious bondage and caning fun (!) - from Christine Campbell Thomson's Terror By Night. Prior to that, the excellent Hugh Lamb had revived a few of the stories for his anthologies.

The Child: The narrator, a city boy and motorcyclist - though not, as he hastens to point out, the type "that carries a leggy flapper on the pinion and sports a cigarette holder a yard long": What's the matter with him? - investigates an alleged haunting at a gamekeepers cottage in the woods near 'Wailing Dip'. Some years before, a woman who'd murdered her children had escaped from the local asylum and was last seen near the site. She was heavily pregnant at the time. The woman is presumed dead down a pot hole, but who or what has been stealing poultry from the village these past years and what did a poacher see that scared him to death?

The Meerschaum Pipe: The narrator moves into 'Heroney', the former country residence of Harper who butchered several women and buried them in the surrounding fields. Or rather, parts of them:

"The most revolting feature of the murders was his habit of severing the head and limbs and leaving them on the scene for identification, while carrying away the trunk for addition to a sort of museum ..."

In between visits to the Vicarage and brushing up on his golf handicap, the new squire takes to smoking Harper's best pipe. The discovery of a gypsy girl's mutilated remains in Arningham Woods signals a new reign of terror ...

Hybrid: In his youth Chambers was plagued by nightmares which a clairvoyant later convinced him were flashbacks from a previous life when he was an adept black magician. when Chambers marries and takes up home in Sussex he realises that this is where his diabolical incarnation practiced evil and the adjoining field is where he was burnt at the stake. his familiar, a raven-like bird, gradually takes him over until - as his devoted wife explains to Dr. Cole - "His body is mad, but his mind is sane". chambers degenerates into a hopping, squawking sex maniac and ravishes his wife. Dr. Cole eventually gets a specialist to take care of him but in the meantime Mrs. Chambers gives birth ...

The Tower Of Moab: "A veritable flock of ghoulish wraiths whirling about a young girl who stood on the kerb, wearing on her face a look of desperation that spoke of private tragedy ... She uttered a ghastly, sobbing scream and hurled herself with a kind of boneless wriggle under the wheels of a lorry."

A salesman, down on his luck, is fascinated by a huge yellow structure began by a religious cult eighty years earlier as their answer to the Tower of Babel. Fascinated and at a loose end, he jacks in his job and takes a room at the local inn where he can drink himself insensible while investigating the tower. As he sinks further into Whiskey oblivion, he becomes aware of the Devils and Angels flitting about the top of the column until the latter descend on the unwitting public en masse, tormenting them with their sins. Eventually his own demons appear and he's taken away to a lunatic asylum.

The Author's Tale: "He would kidnap the venomous swine of a woman and hold her captive in a secret place that he knew, flogging her daily until brute force brought her to absolute subjection."
He is 'Lester', usually an amiable enough fellow with a weakness for the ladies, and she is his third wife who has ruined him, while the remote spot is a deserted farmhouse where he has rigged up his apparatus, a frame with straps and pulleys attached easily capable of suspending his greedy ex until she sees the error of her ways. What he hadn't accounted for was the place being haunted - and by fiends of particularly sadistic bent who commandeer his torture device and use it to discipline one of their own with a savagery that has even the vengeful Lester. what he witnesses that night persuades him to make a significant amendment to his plans ...

Haunted Air: "Apart from its extraordinary shade of pulsating, unnatural green, the object was quite evidently not a bird, and he might momentarily have dubbed it a grotesque toy balloon ... but for the fact that it was so obviously - and somehow horribly alive. Carr described it as resembling a monstrous monkey, clambering with incredible speed up an invisible rope."

A series of mysterious light aircraft crashes claim the lives of a succession of experienced pilots and their passengers. Ace record-breaker Pitchmann sneers at Carr's death, dismissing him as an amateur and a lightweight, and takes to the skies in unpromising weather to prove how great he is. Meanwhile at the bar, Beckett gives his alarming take on the recent tragedies.

Mark Samuels

Brilliant collection and severely sick and twisted. Lewis went ga-ga and wound up in a lunatic asylum after destroying his later unpublished work.

Glad to see you're a fan too Dem!

All best
Mark

weirdmonger

Lewis went ga-ga and wound up in a lunatic asylum after destroying his later unpublished work.

For the grace of God...

John L. Probert

Bit expensive to get hold of though! Couldn't find one for less than £60-00

Mark Samuels

John, Some enterprising small-press should do a cheap paperback reprint. I've got the second edition of the Ghost Story Press edition with the Richard Dalby introduction. I think it cost £35 at the time.

Des, well, I do remember you chucking your tie off the end of a pier once

All best
Mark

David A. Riley

"Bit expensive to get hold of though! Couldn't find one for less than £60-00"

You aren't exagerating. That's cheap, too, compared to most.

Now if only those enterprising people at Wordsworth Classics would take a look...

David

Calenture

"Des, well, I do remember you chucking your tie off the end of a pier once"

You have restored my faith in Des' Lewis as the real wild man of horror.

Dr. Terror

Looks like it's still got 30 years before being out of copyright, so a Wordsworth edition seems unlikely.

[lobolover]

Theese seem interesting.

Small scale reprint or illegal scan?You pick.

[fullbreakfast]

I just acquired a knackered, grimy, falling apart copy of the first edition of this on eBay.

Still, can't complain for 99p ;D

[fullbreakfast]

Finally read it - only nine months on the 'to read' pile indicating fairly high priority

My crumbling 99p special was formerly property of the British Red Cross Hospital Library, Birmingham Depot. As well as bearing a variety of dubious stains and unpleasant deposits, some of the pages (174-176) have been used for scoring a darts match - '301' mainly. It's a copy that tells a story of its own, even if you do want to wash your hands afterwards.

To complete the list of stories with the ones dem hasn't mentioned above:

Lost Keep: Penniless Peter Hunt receives a mysterious legacy - a tiny scale model of a stone fortress, strangely detailed, and what looks like a magnifying glass with an opaque lens. He's quick to discover its secret - the lens (once stripped of its protective coating) allows him to travel into the miniature world of the lost keep and back. It's like having your own pocket kingdom, and being a thorough swine Peter uses it to satisfy his base desires for money and sex (anyone who has something he wants will end up imprisoned in the keep until they turn it over - then left there to die anyway - until the place is littered with decomposing remains). So it's no great loss when he gets a predictable, but satisfying, comeuppance.

The Dirk: Tranter kills his brother in order to inherit his country house and generous income. Not being the superstitious type, he has no qualms about moving into the house, not even in the study where he stabbed John with the dirk that hung above the fireplace. More fool him. Another cold-blooded, conscienceless protagonist who meets a gruesome end, bit of a Lewis speciality that.

The Chords of Chaos: The narrator and his friend Eustace visit the musical medium Westenhanger, who receives tunes from the other side while entranced at his piano. His playing takes them back to past lives in old Atlantis where Westenhanger, the High Priest, incites riot and mass murder by playing the terrible chords of chaos. This doesn't bode well for his organ recital in the village church the following Sunday...

The Iron Swine: Narrated by Beckett, the hard-boiled airman we met earlier in Haunted Air, who's once again holding forth in the flying club bar. The titular 'swine' is a metal-bodied 'plane with a mind of its own, which likes to kill its pilots. There's nothing resembling a scare in this tale, but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway. There's a palpable authenticity in the way he writes about flying and the way his airmen talk.

Animate In Death: Lewis finishes the collection off with a real shocker, visions of the living dead in the shape of an unfortunate girl who drowned (or did she...?) on holiday in the Broads, and is trapped in her waterlogged corpse:

The emaciated sodden legs beat a ceaseless march on the unresisting veil, like those of a gallows victim marking time in air. The battered, half-eaten arms clawed blindly at nothing. The eyes were gone, and within their ragged-edged hollows was manifest the coiling purposeful movement of reptilian life.

It's when she starts to speak, fully aware of the horror of her condition but helpless to escape it, that we move from the merely horrible to the unbearably pathetic. She visits Cary on his houseboat in nightmares he can't wake up from. It falls to his friend Eyston, an expert in the occult, to pay a heavy price in freeing the girl's soul from its awful imprisonment.

I reckon Tales of the Grotesque is a perfect title for this collection, from the queasy one-liner at the end of Hybrid to the horrific apparition of The Child (my favourite, an unutterably grim and depressing little tale that gave me the proper creeps when reading it at 3am...).

[dem]

Brilliant! Thanks for giving us the lowdown on these, mr. Breakfast! I think Ash Tree published a version of Tales Of The Grotesque which adds the bizarre Author's Tale, but more and more, this seems like an ideal case for the Wordsworth treatment. It was The Child that got to me, too - not the first time i've had a Hugh Lamb anthology to thank for putting me onto an author.

[fullbreakfast]

Aug 30, 2009 19:25:12 GMT dem said:

Brilliant! Thanks for giving us the lowdown on these, mr. Breakfast! I think Ash Tree published a version of Tales Of The Grotesque which adds the bizarre Author's Tale, but more and more, this seems like an ideal case for the Wordsworth treatment. It was The Child that got to me, too - not the first time i've had a Hugh Lamb anthology to thank for putting me onto an author.

The Author's Tale sounds truly far out. Ghostly flagellation "for the win" as the kids say.

I'll not be getting my hands on it unless there is a Wordworth edition or something similar though, as I'm no way forking out the £200+ dealers seem to want for the Ghost Story Press edition on the strength of one story I've not read...

[jonathan122]

Sept 4, 2009 17:18:25 GMT fullbreakfast said:

The Author's Tale sounds truly far out. Ghostly flagellation "for the win" as the kids say.

I'll not be getting my hands on it unless there is a Wordworth edition or something similar though, as I'm no way forking out the £200+ dealers seem to want for the Ghost Story Press edition on the strength of one story I've not read...

"The Author's Tale" is in a Richard Dalby anthology of vampire stories which is relatively easy (and cheap!) to find second-hand. It's a great story, possibly my favourite of the Lewis tales I've read, although I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with vampires...

[fullbreakfast]

Sept 4, 2009 18:52:20 GMT jonathan122 said:

"The Author's Tale" is in a Richard Dalby anthology of vampire stories which is relatively easy (and cheap!) to find second-hand. It's a great story, possibly my favourite of the Lewis tales I've read, although I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with vampires...

Great, thanks for the tip Jonathan!

A cursory bit of research indicates that it's in Vampire Stories, an anthology with an introduction by Peter Cushing that originally came out in 1992. Not only are second hand copies available cheap, it's actually in print (in a hardcover edition by Gramercy Press which is also cheap). All in all a result!

[dem]

Sept 4, 2009 18:52:20 GMT jonathan122 said:

"The Author's Tale" is in a Richard Dalby anthology of vampire stories which is relatively easy (and cheap!) to find second-hand. It's a great story, possibly my favourite of the Lewis tales I've read, although I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with vampires...

Me neither. Come to that, could be wrong, but i don't remember Ken Cowley's story having much to do with them either? Anyway, here's the line-up:

Vampire Stories

[piglingbland]

This rare and expensive collection of tales will be reprinted in paperback, under the editorship of Richard Dalby, by Shadow Publishing, in 2014. It will contain all of the stories and Richard's introduction from The Ghost Story Press edition. No date or cover artist yet, but aficionados of Lewis and those trying wishing to own an inexpensive edition of the author's works, will I hope be delighted by this announcement.

[beholder]

Hi. First time posting in here.

I got a copy of this book a while ago.
Last night I read "Haunted Air"

First thing that came to my mind was the Twilight episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet.
But the book predates the episode by almost 3 decades!

The episode was based on a short story by Richard Matheson.
I wonder if Matheson read Lewis book and got inspired by.

Both stories are about a gremlin/demon/spirit creature that tries to destroy airplanes.
The "gremlin" mythology started in the 20's by British pilots, which match Lewis profession and time period.

I've been searching online for a connection between Matheson and his episode to Lewis' short story.
Any thoughts?

[Dr Strange]

Hi Beholder,

I don't think I've ever read Haunted Air, but the summary above reminds me a lot of the even earlier (and probably better known) Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle (1913).

You can read it here - www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/HorHei.shtml

[beholder]

That's very interesting!
Now I wonder who/what served as inspiration for A.C. Doyle!
How far back did the gremlin myth started
Thanks for the link!

[dem]

Just received from our friend David A. Sutton;

SHADOW PUBLISHING NEWS
Welcome to the latest edition.
**********

1. JUST PUBLISHED – TALES OF THE GROTESQUE BY L. A. LEWIS (Edited by Richard Dalby).
2. SHADOW AT THE BIRMINGHAM INDEPENDENT BOOK FAIR.

****************

Dave Fletcher

JUST PUBLISHED – TALES OF THE GROTESQUE BY L. A. LEWIS (Edited by Richard Dalby).
“The emaciated sodden legs beat a ceaseless march on the unresisting veil, like those of a gallows victim marking time in air. The battered, half-eaten arms clawed blindly at nothing. The eyes were gone, and within their ragged-edged hollows was manifest the coiling purposeful movement of reptilian life.”(‘Animate in Death’)

Squadron Leader Leslie Allin Lewis (1899-1961) was a veteran of both world wars, flying Sopwith Camels over France in 1918 and Hurricanes over England in 1940. He was also one of the best writers in the macabre and supernatural genre between wars.

“Lewis undoubtedly earns a high place among the best masters of supernatural and macabre literature that Britain has ever produced”. (Richard Dalby)

“A brilliant collection”. (Mark Samuels)

FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK. This is the first paperback edition of this rare collection of stories by one of our most underrated writers. Mark Samuels, author of The White Hands & Other Weird Tales described the book as a “brilliant collection”. Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales, was first published in 1934 by Philip Allan, part of the “Creeps” series. A second edition appeared in 1994 from The Ghost Story Press and both hardbacks are rare collectables today. The collection is edited and with an introduction by Richard Dalby. Cover art by David Fletcher.

ORDER FROM OUR WEBSITE Shadowpublishing, AMAZON, OR YOUR PREFERRED BOOK RETAILER.

Also available for UK customers by personal cheque - email me for details.
***************

SHADOW AT THE BIRMINGHAM INDEPENDENT BOOK FAIR.
Shadow Publishing will be at the Birmingham Independent Book Fair on Saturday 12th April 2014. It’s at the Ikon Gallery, 1 Oozells Square, Brindley Place, Birmingham, B1 2HS. The event takes place between 11.00 am and 5.00 pm. It’s free, do drop along if you can. Our books will be on sale at a discount! More information here.

Map link here
****************
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Regards,
David.

Shadowpublishing

[weirdmonger]

I am reviewing this book here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/tales-of-the-grotesque-by-l-a-lewis/