Wright & Sheehan - Wake Up Screaming

[dem bones]

Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (ed's.) - Wake Up Screaming: 16 Chilling Tales Of The Macabre (Bantam, Feb. 1967)

Jerome Bixby - It's A Good Life
Robert Bloch - Water's Edge
Leslie Charteris - The Man Who Liked Ants
John Collier - Thus I Refute Beelzy
A. E. Coppard - Arabesque: The Mouse
Roald Dahl - Royal Jelly
C. S. Forester - The Physiology Of Fear
Shirley Jackson - The Summer People
Nigel Kneale - The Pond
George Langelaan - The Fly
Philip MacDonald - Our Feathered Friends
John C. Moore - Decay
Alfred Noyes - Midnight Express
Alice-Mary Schnirring - The Dear Departed
Frederick Treves - The Idol With Hands Of Clay
Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo

I got this mainly for the (uncredited) cover representation of Langelaan's wonderful The Fly. The same old faces for the most part, but this is still a fine collection and at least 15 of the stories are real horror. Of the less anthologised tales, the Leslie Charteris almost makes it: Dr. Sardon breeds giant ants in the conviction that they're the rightful rulers of the planet. They keep escaping and a dog is eaten. When Sardon tries to feed Simon Templar to them, The Saint gets the hump, shoots the mad doctor, and burns his lab. If only the ants had got to devour a few people - still, it's heart's in the right place.

In The Dear Departed, Joe and Mark mastermind a fraudulent Spiritualist service, cleverly conning the gullible bereaved out of vast sums of money. As a joke, Joe throws his voice into the ear of a black truck driver, causing him to panic, lose control of his vehicle, and mow down Mark. At that night's seance, a hideously mutilated corpse manifests itself ...

Better still is It's A Good Life, the truly nasty story of Little Anthony whose magical powers are such that he can read minds and make mice eat themselves if he feels like it. Everybody has to think happy thoughts around him, as it just doesn't do to upset him in even the slightest way ...

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pulphack wrote:

so anyway, finally read a few of the stories from this last week. and what a mixed bag they were!

the nigel kneale story had bags of atmosphere, and a very nasty denoument. could see it coming a mile off, but it was nicely delivered. the most horrific bit for me was the idea of frogs in clothes set in tableau... or is that just me?

the phillip macdonald one was an oddity. not for the plot, as again you could see the ending, but because it had a lightness of tone that echoed his comic novels and shouldn't have worked in theory, but because it provided contrast just about managed to pull it off. and even though its completely different in so many ways, the way in which the people are mesmerised by the forest reminded me of that Barrington Bayley New Worlds story where there are intelligence gathering bee-like creatures, and the protagonist gets trapped in the hive by the sheer weight of knowledge (help - lost the anthology years back so can't remember the title). no real plot similarity, but it was the atmosphere conjured that triggered that, i think.

and then, by complete contrast, the saint story! ah - giant ants, a pretty damsel in distress, Templar's nonchalance, and that flippant authorial tone that works in shorts but gets irritating to me over a whole novel. a nice bit of pulp.

all that, and i still haven't read the Bloch yet.

[allthingshorror]

What a COVER!! One for the 'must have' list, methinks!!

[carolinec]

Ah, Jerome Bixby - "It's a Good Life" - the first story on the list there. This is one of my all-time favourite short stories. I first came across it, not as a story to be read, but as an episode (by the same name) of The Twilight Zone. Teleplay by Rod Serling, starring Billy Mumy - the one who played the really annoying little blonde-haired, freckled boy in Lost in Space (the original TV series, not the film they did a few years ago).

Anyway, it was certainly one of the good TZ episodes, but then I picked up a copy of the book The Twilight Zone - The Original Stories, edited by Greenberg, Matheson and Waugh. And, boy, is that one scary story! It's far scarier when you read it than it is on screen in TZ.

It might not appeal to everyone here - it scares by suggestion rather than anything too explicit - but I think it's an amazingly written, powerful story.

Oh, if you've seen The Twilight Zone - The Movie that they did in - was it the 80s or 90s? - the story in that with the kid who imagines cartoon characters and brings them to life is based on this story. But in order of scariness I'd say: written story first, original TZ episode 2nd, with updated one in the film way behind.

[dem bones]

Bloch's macabre treat for rat fans notwithstanding, most of the better stories in this book are deadly creepy as opposed to horrific, or so it seems to me: Arabesque, Midnight Express, Our Feathered Friends .... Shirley Jackson's The Summer People is a neat example. You know something dreadful is going to happen to the Allison's if they don''t vacate their dream holiday cottage on labor day as has always been the tradition, but you're never told what. It's a perfect companion piece to her far better known tale of sinister villagers and their weird traditions, The Lottery.