Richard Powers The Fiend In You Ed. by Charles Beaumont (Ballantine Books 1962)
Introduction’ – Charles Beaumont
‘Finger Prints’ – Richard Matheson
‘Fools Mate’ – Stanley Ellin
‘Big, Wide, Wonderful World’ – Charles E. Fritch
‘The Night Of The Gran Baile Mascara’ – Whit Burnett
‘A Punishment To Fit The Crimes’ – Richard M. Gordon
‘The Hornet’ – George Clayton Johnson
‘Perchance To Dream’ – Charles Beaumont
‘The Thirteenth Step’ – Fritz Leiber
‘The Conspiracy’ – Robert Lowry
‘Room With A View’ – Esther Carlson
‘The Candidate’ – Henry Slesar
‘One Of Those Days’ – William F. Nolan
‘Lucy Comes To Stay’ – Robert Bloch
‘The Women’ – Ray Bradbury
‘Surprise!’ – Ronald Bradford
‘Mute’ – Richard Matheson
These are “tales of insidious evil that lurks within every human being”, where “the real roots of abysmal terror and monstrous evil lie in the human mind”…
‘Finger Prints’ - Richard Matheson
On a night time bus a man sits opposite two women communicating in sign language. One of the women is a deaf mute, the other her troubled paid companion. At the insistence of the deaf woman he finds himself sat beside the companion. She tells how tired she is of the deaf woman, how she never leaves her alone, how she can never be with a man because she can’t get away. Then she makes a desperate and fierce sexual advance which is practically rape and also seems quite vampiric... And the deaf woman has been watching all the time...
This was a strange and disturbing opening story, quite ugly in fact. The bizarre parasitic relationship between the two women makes for uncomfortable reading...
‘Fool’s Mate’ – Stanley Ellin
Downtrodden and dreary George receives an unexpected gift of a chess set. His bossy sneering wife Louise is scornful and refuses to be his chess partner. George becomes obsessed with the game but still lacks an opponent. In time George’s passion for chess materialises into Mr. White, a mirror image of George physically but opposite in every other way possible – confident, dominant, astute. And Mr. White really hates Louise…
‘The Hornet’ – George Clayton Johnson
A man in a car with a hornet. He’s in a strop after arguing with his wife. The hornet is mean and crawls ever closer. He takes a swipe with a newspaper and crashes the car, killing himself. The hornet survives and flies off into another car. That’s it.
‘Perchance to Dream’ – Charles Beaumont
Philip Hall goes to a psychiatrist, desperate and afraid to sleep. He’s been awake for 72 hours he says. He has a heart condition and the doctors tell him a sudden shock could kill him. He also tells how he’s been dreaming, of a girl in a fairground who lures him on to a rollercoaster ride, each time he dreams he becomes more afraid, until he can’t tell reality from dreaming…
Probably my favourite story so far, perhaps a little obvious – you kind of know what’s coming but sometimes that doesn’t matter.
‘The Thirteenth Step’ – Fritz Leiber
This takes place at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and focuses on Sue, a young girl “just out of her teens” who started drinking at the age of seven. By thirteen she was a confirmed alocoholic. Sue tells of her descent into addiction and her ever present fear of Death, who is waiting for her in a big black shiny cadillac, who tells her there is a thirteenth step to the AA’s prgogramme…
Mute’ – Richard Matheson
This is a very thoughtful and thought provoking story. Paal’s parents are killed in a ferocious house fire on the outskirts of a small American town called German Corners. The boy is taken in by the Sheriff and his wife Cora, who is silently hiding her grief over the loss of her own son in a swimming accident some years before. Paal never speaks, the sound of words spoken is painful to him: “then the sound would start again, rising and falling in a rhythmless beat, jarring and grating, rubbing at the live, glistening surface of comprehension until it was dry, aching and confused.”
It is pretty clear to the reader that Paal is telepathic but the Sheriff and his wife are horrified by what they see as the neglect of his parents in not teaching him to speak. In time a Professor from Germany arrives to see the boy and all is explained. Paal and three other children were part of an experiment, to raise them as telepaths, communicating only with their minds. But by the time the Professor arrives the damage has been done, and finally Paal speaks.
This is a very different offering from ‘Finger Prints’, it is a sad story rather than horrifying. It explores the notion of well-meaning but misguided good being dangerously close to evil. In the end poor Paal loses a great gift in order to fit in…
‘Lucy Comes to Stay’ – Robert Bloch
This looks like a basic re-telling of ‘Psycho’ as far as I can see, instead of Norman and Mother you have alcoholic Vi and alter-ego Lucy. It is Lucy who plans to break Vi out of the sanatorium, it’s Lucy who stabs Vi’s husband George in the neck with the scissors – not Vi.
Even if this does feel like familiar territory it still works, there is something very chilling about madness I think.