Michel Parry - Mayflower Black Magic 4

[dem]

Michel Parry (ed.) - The 4th Mayflower Book Of Black Magic Stories (Mayflower, 1976)

Aleister Crowley - At The Fork In The Roads
James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness
C. M. Kornbluth - The Words Of Guru
David Drake - Blood Debt
Daphne Castell - The Fishers By The Fountain
Manly Wade Wellman - Vigil
Ray Russell - The Cage
F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull
Ramsey Campbell - Dolls

Aleister Crowley - At The Fork In The Roads: Poet and Black Magician Will Bute sends Hypatia Gay, the woman who loves him, to the flat of rival Count Swanoff to establish a magical link through which he can be destroyed. The Count, himself a Neophyte, urges Miss Gay to defect from Bute but as she leaves she manages to scratch him with her brooch and returns to her lover with a drop of his blood. Mission accomplished!

The following morning Count Swanoff is too weak to reach his bathroom and for ten days and nights he suffers Hellish torments as Bute does his worst, but with the counselling of his 'Master' he wins through. Now it is time to punish Hypatia and Swanoff is entirely merciless. Be warned, this is strong stuff, particularly the paragraphs detailing Hypatia's doom which Crowley obviously couldn't wait to get to when he rattled this one off.

Manly Wade Wellman - Vigil: Myersville, Pennsylvania. Hermoine Simmons steals a spell-book bound in human skin from Professor Enderby on a whim and summons forth a demon she can't control. Enderby keeps vigil over all night explaining that the thing is obliged to drink some of her blood on a twenty-four hour basis. The familiar tries to outwit the Prof by assuming the form of his faithful Chinese servant Quong, but Enderby is too smart and stabs it through the heart with a white thorn spike.
"Oh, I think you're wonderful", she twittered, "I'll never be able to repay you! Anything you ask ..."
Enderby looked at her calculatingly. "I'll ask three things."
"Yes?"
"Wash off that paint and keep it off. Then eat your supper without talking. And finally - aren't you in a hurry to get to wherever you're going? Well, then, don't let me keep you".

Daphne Castell - The Fishers By The Fountain: Poor John and his anonymous girlfriend! One minute enjoying a love-making session, the next bowed before the sacred fishermen on account of something one of them gasped in the throes of passion and now that scary Priestess woman is giving them a stark choice: which of them is to be the sacrifice?

James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950):

"Perhaps God had decided that proper humans had made a muddle of running the world: had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night."

Fifty plus pages of pulp manna! There Shall Be No Darkness provided the basis for the slightly deranged Amicus shocker The Beast Must Die, though sadly you don't get the thirty second 'spot the werewolf' break until Subotsky got on the case: Loch Rannoch, Scotland. The Newcliffe's house party is enlivened considerably by the discovery that red eyed, hairy-palmed concert pianist Jan Jarmoskowski is a werewolf and must be destroyed. Round and round the estate they roam - Newcliffe, his wife Caroline, psychiatrist and werewolf expert Christian Lundgren, prying artist Paul Foote, Doris the fledgling witch, etc. - armed with their supply of DIY silver bullets. When one of the party is killed, Foote realises that there is a second werewolf among them. This may sound far-fetched but in this story lycanthrope is a highly contagious disease and all it takes is a mere scratch for the victim to become tainted. At the climax, Jarmoskowski gets to tell it from the man-wolf's point of view, and you have to concede they have a rotten time of it.

[franklinmarsh]

Oct 19, 2007 18:14:25 GMT dem said:

[ James Blish - There Shall Be No Darkness (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950):

"Perhaps God had decided that proper humans had made a muddle of running the world: had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night."

Fifty plus pages of pulp manna! There Shall Be No Darkness provided the basis for the slightly deranged Amicus shocker The Beast Must Die, though sadly you don't get the thirty second 'spot the werewolf' break until Subotsky got on the case: Loch Rannoch, Scotland. The Newcliffe's house party is enlivened considerably by the discovery that red eyed, hairy-palmed concert pianist Jan Jarmoskowski is a werewolf and must be destroyed. Round and round the estate they roam - Newcliffe, his wife Caroline, psychiatrist and werewolf expert Christian Lundgren, prying artist Paul Foote, Doris the fledgling witch, etc. - armed with their supply of DIY silver bullets. When one of the party is killed, Foote realises that there is a second werewolf among them. This may sound far-fetched but in this story lycanthrope is a highly contagious disease and all it takes is a mere scratch for the victim to become tainted. At the climax, Jarmoskowski gets to tell it from the man-wolf's point of view, and you have to concede they have a rotten time of it.

Watched The Beast Must Die over the weekend, and almost enjoyed it for once. A little bit of googling revealed that it was based on a short story, and not an original screenplay. This sounds damn' fine. Apparently there are two versions of the story though...

[Johnlprobert]

Sept 6, 2010 10:35:54 GMT franklinmarsh said:

Watched The Beast Must Die over the weekend, and almost enjoyed it for once.

Poor old Amicus. It's hard to believe that movie was contemporaneous with From Beyond the Grave. Isn't the music awful? And pretty much everything else!

I had the James Blish novella in Peter Cushing's Tales of a Monster Hunter

[dem]

don't have a copy, but there's also a novelisation of the film. Alwyn reviews it on Trash Fiction

Robert Black (Robert Holdstock) - Legend Of The Werewolf (Sphere, 1976)

[franklinmarsh]

Now that's a werewolf fillum! The first twenty minutes are pretty hard going, but the rest is a delight.

[dem]

Trust me to get my werewolf films in a twist. what's all this about another version of There shall Be No Darkness, FM?

[franklinmarsh]

Is the one in this volume set in Scotland? I saw a reference to an earlier (?) version set in the US.

[dem]

Yeah, this one is Scotland. He had an earlier, and entirely different story, Wolves Of Darkness set in West Texas, so perhaps that's been mistakenly dragged into it?

[franklinmarsh]

www.amazon.com/Treasury-Modern-Fantasy-Terry-Carr/dp/0380771152

Check out the second review - that was my source. ?!?!?!?

[dem]

News to me. Wonder which version came first? Not sure I'd really want There Shall Be No Darkness relocated to the US.

C. M. Kornbluth - The Words Of Guru: Child prodigy Peter, twelve, sees and hears things those around him cannot, and one such entity is the powerful demonic entity, Guru. Guru teaches him the words that kill, the words that ensnare women, the words that procure fortunes ... In a very short time Peter has learned all there is to learn from Guru including that one forbidden word he'll save for a rainy day - and should that arrive, there will be no hope for any of us ...

An SF treatment of Black Magic, I guess, which builds to a devastating last line. An evocative portrayal of a Sabbat with all the trimmings, too.

F. Marion Crawford – The Screaming Skull: Tredcombe Village, Cornwall. Luke Pratt killed his wife having been given the means by retired sea captain Charles Braddock when he innocently related the details of a particularly sadistic murder: the killer poured boiling lead into his victim’s ear via a funnel (!). To avoid detection, Pratt severed his wife’s head and kept it in a hatbox.

Braddock inherits the Pratts’ cottage on the death of a doctor friend by “hand or teeth of a person or animal unknown”, and soon the skull is up and out of its box, rolling around and shrieking at him. The late Mrs. Pratt still hasn’t absolved the captain for giving her wretched husband ideas.