Fred Pickersgill - And Graves Give Up Their

[dem bones]

Fred Pickersgill (ed.) - And Graves Give Up Their Dead (Corgi, 1964)

Photograph: Dunstan Pereira

William Link & William Levinson - Top Flight Aquarium
Gerald Bullett - the Elder
Roald Dahl - Royal Jelly
Charles Beaumont - Miss Gentilbelle
Richard Matheson - Girl Of My Dreams
Ambrose Birece - an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Robert Arthur - Death Is A Dream
Richard Davis - the Female Of The Species
John Collier - De Mortius
Wilbur Daniel Steele - Footfalls

Seems bloody ages since i landed a lovely pre-battered, smelly old anthology, and this one looks a stormer. While much of the material - including what is arguably Beaumont's most horrific moment and Matheson's splendid succubus shocker - will be familiar from other selections, i'm particularly looking forward to experiencing the Gerald "Dearth's Farm" Bullett and Richard Davis contributions, neither of which i've come across elsewhere. Pickersgill's other Corgi anthologies No Such Thing As A Vampire and Horror 7 are likewise worth investigating. Many thanks to the excellent Riley Books for turning up a copy. You can be sure that some of the ropier items among today's shipment from darkest Accrington will feature on here very shortly.

[dem bones]

ah, this could be the collection that weans me off novels for a tick.

William Link & William Levinson - Top Flight Aquarium: Jimmy lands a job as doorman at the luxurious Hotel Pacific on Wiltshire Boulevard after the previous guy suddenly up and quit. Soon he befriends an eccentric widow who regularly takes her goldfish for a swim in the manager's pond. Eventually the old girl expresses concern at a recent spate of burglaries and wonders if Jimmy will look after her place while she's visiting her sister? She'd hate for her jewellery to be stolen, to say nothing of the original Cezanne ....

Jimmy yields to temptation. Now all he has to do is overpower the guard-goldfish ...

A decent enough titbit for "when seafood attack!" fans, but the next up is a real treat.

Gerald Bullett - The Elder: Bullett is probably best known to us for Dearth's Farm which Robert Aickman admired enough to include in Fontana Ghost 7. The Elder, which seems to have been his only other venture into the supernatural, is absolute class! After a weary trek across the moors, three travellers come upon a deserted village and put up at a derelict inn, The Horse & Plough. The girl of the party is frightened, young Wester doesn't much care for the gloomy place either, so, to cheer them up and while away the long hours til dawn, the old stranger tells them why those that still could eventually fled the village. He sure proves to be an authority on the subject.

'The Elder' (as Wester nicknames him) was the local schoolteacher at the time, fifty years of age and betrayed in love for the second time in his life. This latest hurt convinced him that "there are too many young women in the world" and his nightly survey of lovers lanes only cemented his resolve to "cleanse my village of this creeping corruption." As it turned out, he needn't lift a finger. By a stroke of good fortune a sadistic killer took charge of the matter. Dolly Salop - "I called the girl to mind; a fair buxom creature with a saucy eye and rather opulent charms." - was but the first of several victims to be "murdered and worse" until the phantom slayer had so whittled down the community only 'the Elder' had the stomach to remain. Fans of Nick Cave's classic murder ballad Song Of Joy from Murder Ballads will be in their element with this one.

John Collier - De Mortuis: When Buck and Bud surprise Dr. Rankin at work with pick, trowel and cement in his cellar, they know what must have happened - he's finally found out that he's been married to the town floozy all these years and murdered Irene! Well, you couldn't say he wasn't provoked and, what with him being such a swell guy and all, hey! don't mind us Doc, we ain't seen nothin'!

Richard Davis - The Female Of The Species: Just reached the halfway mark. i'm a big fan of Richard Davis's short horror fiction of which, regrettably there doesn't seem to be much, and this suspenseful novella is pushing all the right buttons so far.

Told in diary form. Narrator Jim, a high octane sales rep, rescues a ginger kitten from being trampled underfoot at Portobello Road Market. The kitten adopts him as its owner. Jim can't wait to show kitty off to his dear, devoted wife Viola when she returns from Oslo (typical of Vi, she's flown out to care for her useless brother Robin who has contracted pneumonia. But Viola doesn't make it back. She's incinerated when her plane crashes over the channel.

Only after the funeral can Jim bring himself to sort through Viola's things and that's when he makes the startling discovery that her harmless interest in books of witchcraft, black sorcery and the transmigration of souls was anything but. Maybe Robin is right to refer to his late sister as "evil" - it now seems abundantly clear that she'd lied to and cheated on Jim as a matter of course. The kitten, meanwhile, is getting kind of big ...

[Johnlprobert]

Oh this looks fun, & I have very few of the stories listed here except the obvious ones (Dahl, Collier, Bierce). I don't even have the Beaumont, unless the Demonik encyclopedia knows if it's in any other anthos?

[dem bones]

Fontana Horror #6 (the one with the man-eating snail on the cover) will see you alright for Miss Gentilbelle, Lord P. There's a thread for FH6 here, but it's obscenely spoiler heavy and best avoided.

The Richard Davis story may well be original to And Graves Give Up .... and i've not found the Bullett mini-masterpiece in any other collection of this kind. Fred Pickersgill - good man!

[Johnlprobert]

I don't have Fontana No. 6

But a quick look at the first posting on that thread makes me realise the cover wasn't about a normal-sized snail giving birth to a tiny man at all!

[dem bones]

Only other place I can spot it is in Beaumont's collection The Magic Man & Other Science-Fantasy Stories (Coronet, 1966), but that can't be right! um, will get back to you unless someone else can help out in meantime?

Cissification, dominant wills, misogyny/ misandry, possession from beyond the grave - maybe its just coincidental that there's a battle of the sexes theme running through the bulk of these stories? Anyway, as expected, Richard Davis brings his super Female Of The Species to a suitably grim conclusion, and next up it's;

Richard Matheson - Girl Of My Dreams: Meet Greg and his unwitting accomplice Carrie whose "gift" is the ability to dream of appalling tragedies some days in advance of their taking place. Once he's taken down the gory details, Greg then offers to sell date, time and place of impending catastrophe to the party whose life is at risk. Tonight they call on rich Mrs. Wheeler to inform her that, by the middle of the month, her children will die horribly unless she parts with $10,000.

Greg is as entirely unsympathetic a criminal as Carrie is tragic. He detests her as a "snivelling, stupid, ugly bitch", while she is so besotted as to go along with anything to keep him. Nasty stuff for sure, though a Birkin or Level would have notched up the unpleasantness even higher with an alternate ending.

Robert Arthur - Death Is A Dream: David's imaginary evil twin brother 'Richard' is back after a fifteen year absence and his dead wife Louise has returned from her grave in Fairfield Cemetery demanding hush-money. All this on the eve of him taking the lovely Ann up the aisle as the second Mrs. Carpenter. On the plus side, this is only taking place in David's nightmares. Dr. Manson cured him once and, as he assures the worried Ann, he will do so again. Happily for we rotten thrill-seekers, 'Richard' has other ideas ...

Am a big fan of Robert Arthur's horror shorts. Chances are you'll see the dastardly twist coming from a mile away, but somehow this only adds to the winning, slightly nasty comic strip approach.

[piglingbland]

Interesting in that the cover of And Graves Give Up Their Dead, by film director Dunstan Peirera, is an image from the short film "Viola", produced by Richard Davis and based on his short story "The Female of the Species". The film was made in 1967, with music by Ravi Shankar.

And incidentally, anyone know anything about editor Frederick Pickersgill? Is it a pseudonym?

[humgoo]

Apr 30, 2021 19:26:21 GMT piglingbland said:

And incidentally, anyone know anything about editor Frederick Pickersgill? Is it a pseudonym?

So it's not a pseudonym of Richard Davis?

[Dr Strange]

Apr 30, 2021 19:26:21 GMT piglingbland said:

Interesting in that the cover of And Graves Give Up Their Dead... is an image from the short film "Viola", produced by Richard Davis and based on his short story "The Female of the Species".

And incidentally, anyone know anything about editor Frederick Pickersgill? Is it a pseudonym?

May 1, 2021 13:54:16 GMT humgoo said:

So it's not a pseudonym of Richard Davis?

I think it probably is - the "Frederick Pickersgill" edited anthologies always seem to include a Richard Davis story.

Coincidentally (?), Frederick Richard Pickersgill was a 19th C. artist, some of whose best known works are depictions of "Viola" from Twelfth Night.

[piglingbland]

Yes, almost certainly Richard Davis was Frederick Pickersgill. The three Pickersgill anthologies contain all reprints except for the three Davis stories. The books were published 1964-65 a few years before Richard used his own by-line editing Tandem Horror 2 & 3 (1968-9). It might be thought that he wanted to disguise the fact of using his own work in the earlier anthologies, but he also used his own work in the Tandem books. So it's curious why he wanted to use a pseudonym for his first published books.