William Sansom - Various Temptations

[jonathan122]

Various Temptations - William Sansom (Tartarus Press 2002)

Introduction by Mark Valentine
The Equilibriad
A Woman Seldom Found
The Little Room
A Smell of Fear
From the Water Junction
The Peach-House-Potting-Shed
A Country Walk
The Forbidden Lighthouse
Murder
Saturation Point
The Long Sheet
Fireman Flower
The Cliff
The Vertical Ladder
The Little Fears
The Tournament
Various Temptations
Crabfroth
A Saving Grace
One Sunny Afternoon
In the Maze
My Tree
A Touch of the Sun
The Ballroom
Pas De Deux

[dem bones]

Much of this rehashed from elsewhere on the board, but this thread could do with a kick-start! Sanson must have been among the least-likely Pan Horror authors - way too subtle, often ending the story at the precise moment the horror he's been building toward is about to begin, requiring the reader to provide their own ending - but i'd guess he was also one of Van Thal's personal favourites. And he's a grower. As an impatient teen who needed his full quota of blood, flying intestinal gloop and gratuitous bad sex interludes to get by on, i'd routinely avoid anything bearing Samson's name, having been genuinely creeped out by The Vertical Ladder in Pan Horror 2 but indifferent to everything else, including the beautifully written walled-up nun mini-masterpiece The Little Room which was a favourite sub-genre! And now? i appreciate his genius.

Various Temptations: Ronald Raikes, 31, is wanted for questioning in connection with the Victoria murders. Four London prostitutes have been strangled in a week and the known sex-offender has gone to ground. On impulse, he climbs a ladder and climbs in the open bedroom window of Clara, a plain and lonely woman who's just been reading about the slayings. Telling her not to be frightened, he finds himself pouring out a very diluted account of his life story. Despite suspecting him to be the murderer, still she shelters him, finding it all a great adventure and soon they are making arrangements for their wedding. To celebrate his 32nd birthday, Clara throws him a party and, much to her own amazement, dolls herself up for the occasion, getting her hair done, buying a new blouse and even applying a dash of lipstick which is probably not the most advisable course of action in the circumstances, though the creepy undercurrent suggests she had a death wish all along.

A Woman Seldom Found: A disillusioned young man on holiday in Rome meets and falls in love with a mysterious and beautiful woman and it seems that his desperate belief that there is such a thing as the perfect encounter is about to be realised …

The Man With The Moon In Him: We follow a clearly unbalanced wretch as we handers around an underground station at night, waiting for the last train. It’s obvious this man is on the verge of doing somebody – a woman – serious harm, if not within the confines of the story, then shortly after it ends …

A Smell Of Fear: Shy, lonely Diana Craig believes she is being stalked by a dangerous madman with a limp and a livid birthmark on his arm. To avoid him on her way home at night, she ducks into the local pub. Two youths follow her out .....

The Little Room: Margheurita is boarded up alive in a convent cell for "the usual", a particularly sadistic refinement to her torture being the manometer affixed to the wall to register the decline of oxygen so she can better understand the hopelessness of her plight.

[Johnlprobert]

Here's one of the reasons I love the Vault. I got this book, read a few stories under less than ideal conditions and decided I didn't really get on with Mr Sansom. However, in view of Dem's comments above I'm going to dig out that tangerine coloured (if not flavoured) volume and give it another go. I remember the Vertical Ladder and The Little Room as being decent Pan horrors from when I was a kid but some of his other stuff IS rather weird.

[dem bones]

It's lovely to go back to a book after an interval of years and discover that a story or author you thought you detested is actually a bit great! Maybe as recently as five years ago, if i'd compiled a list of my least favourites from the early Pan's, John Keir Cross's The Other Passenger, Angus Wilson's Raspberry Jam and all things Sansom bar The Vertical Ladder would have featured close to the top. Now they'd be nailed on for a place on the most treasured list where, admittedly, they'd find plenty of company. i've never even set eyes on a copy of Various Temptations but should one ever cross my path, i know it's one i'd dip in and out of rather than attempt to belt through story by story, because he often goes in for strange and thought-provoking over no-nonsense mindless horror.

Re-reading The Little Room on Saturday, i even had a Charles Birkin moment! The same languid style, the crushing inevitability of the outcome ...

[monker]

I'm not a fan of 'Raspberry Jam' (the story, not the preserve). For someone who has a liking for the horror genre, grisliness is not my thing. It also revels in the very thing it is supposed to be against just like Harlan Ellison's SF does.

I read Sampson's A Woman Seldom Found and it reads like a cartoon come to life. That is enough to put me on side in theory but in practice it just left me thinking "Huh?". I think the lack of enough irony in its build-up and its overall brevity worked against it.

I'm willing to to give the author another go, though.

[Craig Herbertson]

I think there's a borderline, not easily defined, between gratuitous grisliness which is great fun and gratuitous grisliness which seems to revel in its subject in a disturbing way. I disliked some of Ellison's work for this reason

[monker]

Certainly, and I don't want to come over all self-righteous. It's just that there is one key 'scene' in Wilson's Raspberry Jam (I think those who have read it may know which one I'm getting at) that sort of tips it over for me. There is sort of a nihilistic glee in it that comes at an unfortunate part of the story and it disagrees with my sense of poetic justice or aptness. If I said any more I'd be giving too much away.