Corgi Horror: 1960's

[jamesdoig]

May 28, 2009 11:10:47 GMT marksamuels said:

I've got both somewhere in the Samuels garret.

Ah! "The Man Who Collected Machen."

[marksamuels]

Sorry, this one's probably been on here too, but I'm 42 today you know and can't recall.

Mark S.

[allthingshorror]

Happy Birthday MARK!!!! That must mean it's also Dickie Staines' birthday also??

[jamesdoig]

Very nice!

[sara]

The Premature Burial and other tales of horror
An anthology of past and present writers of the uncanny and horrific.
Corgi Books 1966

CONTENTS
The Premature Burial – Edgar Allan Poe
I’ll Kiss You Goodnight – Frederick H Christian
Thrawn Janet – Robert Louis Stevenson
Cat – James Pearson
The Flesh of the Devil – A.J.Ronald
Sir Edmund Orme – Henry James
A Dream of Crows – Richard Hengist
Carmilla – Sheridan Le Fanu

[dem bones]

hi Sara. pretty sure that's one of George Underwood's paintings. He provided cover artwork for a similar Corgi anthology from 1966, the Alex Hamilton-edited The Cold Embrace (why they had a guy edit an all female anthology, i never understood, but, like Richard Dalby with the Virago Ghost Story series, at least he made a decent job of it!).

[sara]

Cheers, what an amazing artist - why aren’t the cover artists credited more often?!

Out of the two anthologies it looks like Cold Embrace gives the better value - Premature Burial is a slim 150 pages long, with half of those taken up by Carmilla. There are three other classics and four never-before-published stories:

I’ll Kiss You Goodnight – Frederick H Christian
A short but well written story about a man who gets hit by a bus, then transformed into a vampire via what was supposed to have been a life-saving blood transfusion. Then the donor turns up on his doorstep and his troubles really begin...

Cat – James Pearson
It’s the winter of 1854 during the Crimean war. A captured soldier jumps off a train and escapes into the forest. Feverish, half starved and badly wounded by a gun shot wound to the knee, he crawls through the undergrowth before finding sanctuary in an abandoned old hut where he is befriended by a cat with a silver bell around her neck. The cat becomes his protector, keeping him warm and even bringing him smelly old bandages to dress his wounds with.

He seems to be getting better – but the stronger he gets the more the cat seems to resent him. Why? I must say, the ending took me completely by surprise and was pretty gross in an understated kind of way.

The Flesh of the Devil – A. J. Ronald
A man on his wedding night gets possessed by an evil entity haunting the hotel room where he is honeymooning. Powerless to resist the demonic force taking over his body, he knocks his wife unconscious then opens a cupboard by the wardrobe. In it is a spider – the size of a dinner plate and covered with wispy hair-like antennae. The spider hops up on to the bed where his wife is sleeping and starts crawling over her body, sucking the life out of her.

Regaining his senses the man finds a knife and attacks the spider just as it nestles into her throat. He hacks and hacks away at it – only to find himself standing over his wife’s torn up body. Of course he is declared insane and sent to Broadmoor - it’s an open and shut case, the only question at trial being the nature of the strange grey sticky stuff found on the murder weapon, a substance as yet unidentified....

A Dream of Crows - Richard Hengist
Another man moves into a new house with his wife and starts dreaming about crows. Lots of crows. His dreams and hallucinations become increasingly bizarre – culminating in a night of terrifying sleep-paralysis where all he can do is lie helpless and watch while his wife is ravished by a man-sized, repugnantly smelly crow. Her eyes get pecked out. Thankfully he wakes up – only to find himself covered in blood, a knife in his hand... his wife’s body on the bed...

This was the strangest of the lot for me. I’m not sure if the complete lack of explanation or back story (was the house built on an ancient crow burial ground? Did he run over a crow on the way home and neglect to stop?) added to or detracted from the overall creepiness of the story - I think perhaps the former.

(why they had a guy edit an all female anthology, i never understood, but, like Richard Dalby with the Virago Ghost Story series, at least he made a decent job of it!).

Yeah, I’ve read the Virago Book of Ghost Stories from the 20th Century and it was great so I’m looking forward to getting round to reading the Victorian one. At the moment I’m slowly but surely making my way through -The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and the Macabre by Victorian Women Writers, also edited by a man (Mike Ashley) interestingly enough.

[dem bones]

Ah, thank you so much for that enlightening post, Sara. i've not got Premature Burial but by the looks of it, it's along the lines of the three Fred Pickersgill Corgi anthologies of 1964-66 - And Graves Give Up Their Dead, No Such Thing As A Vampire and Horror 7 - where he'd mix in a few originals with the standard 'classic' material (in Mr. Pickergill's case, he invariably ran a story by Richard Davis which made me wonder if the two were really two after all). i must admit, you've made the four lesser known stories in Premature Burial sound like belters.

i'd not heard of Mike Ashley's The Darker Sex until you mentioned it. i've found a neat scan and the blurb but perhaps, when you've a moment, you could list the content?

[sara]

Hi Demonik, I've messaged you the contents direct in case you wanted to post them on a different thread - I couldn't figure out which one!
cheers, sara

[dem bones]

thanks sara. i couldn't figure where to put it either, which tells you all you need to know about how user-friendly this board is. By rights i guess it belongs in with the post 2000 publications, but i've added it in the Wordsworth-interest section as that's where those who are most likely to be interested tend to conglomerate. Thanks for taking the trouble!

[dem bones]

three beauties to add to the orgy of corgi's:

Feb 10, 2009 20:45:42 GMT justin said:

And A Stir of Echoes by Matheson but it's right at the back of a shelf... sorry!

Richard Matheson - A Stir Of Echoes (Corgi, 1960)

Blurb:
It dtarted out as a game - a simple little experiment in hypnosis. But suddenly it ceased to be a game. Because some strange, unholy power yook hold of Tom Wallace's mind that night and plunged him into a dark and bloody moment of an unknown woman's past - into a nightmare of time without a present or a future ....

Richard Matheson - SHOCK! (Corgi, 1962)

Boris Karloff (ed) – Horror Anthology (Corgi, 1967)

Introduction: Boris Karloff

Frank Gruber – The Thirteenth Floor
Edmond Hamilton – Child Of The Winds
Edgar Allan Poe – The Cask Of Amontillado
John Jakes – The Opener Of The Crypt
August Derleth – The Thing That Walked On The Wind
Evan Hunter – The Scarlet King
Theodore Sturgeon – The Graveyard Reader
C. M. Kornbluth – The Mind Worm
Robert Silverberg – Back From The Grave
Roald Dahl – Man From The South
Robert Bloch – The Opener Of The Way
H. P. Lovecraft – The Haunter Of The Dark

Blurb:
Tales of twilight and the grrave
Of horror and the unseen
Of Vampires
Black Magic
And the living tomb

Stories by twelve great doyens of darkness.