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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 4, 2010 21:09:10 GMT
R Chetwynd-Hayes (ed.) - The 9th Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories. (1973)Judith Merril with Algis Budrys - Death Cannot Wither Edith Wharton - The Lady Maid's Bell Algernon Blackwood - Keeping His Promise A.E.D. Smith - The Coat Amelia B Edwards - The Four-Fifteen Express Patrick Davis - Sally Ann Bridge - The Song in the House 'Ex Private X' - The Sweeper Roger Hicks - The Glove Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray R Chetwynd Hayes - The Liberated Tiger And so RCH takes the baton (or is rather given it by Fontana after they wrestled from Mr Aickman) for his first bash at the FGGS series, and if nothing else at least this one is full of stories featuring actual ghosts. Reviews coming in a bit.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 5, 2010 7:32:08 GMT
Judith Merril with Algis Budrys - Death Cannot Wither. Here's an interesting one to start off with. A man dies but his over-possessive wife won't let his ghost pass over to the other side. Resigned to this they carry on as a 'normal' married couple until she finds herself with a true phantom pregnancy. His body is buried in the nearby quarry and as she wants to reunite father with child we get a scene that probably shocked subscribers to the more genteel type of ghost story they might have thought they were in for. "I've got something for you, Jack..."
Edith Wharton - The Lady Maid's Bell. 'Hartley', a lady's maid who has just recovered from 'the typhoid' gets employed at the kind of isolated grim country house with a history of dead children that we all know and love. The servants are lovely, her mistress is very delicate and her only pleasure is handsome Mr Hanson who lives in the house across the way. Odd then that her piggy eyed scarlet-faced, easily-prone-to-bouts-of-insane-temper husband gets on with him so well. The ghost of the previous maid has the answer to it all, or does she? I must confess I read this twice & still didn't really understand what happened at the end.
Algernon Blackwood - Keeping His Promise. Very ordinary compared with the 'Blackwood greats', a medical student is visited by the ghost of his dead friend to keep a pact they made as children.
Full marks to RCH so far for having three stories all with actual ghosts in.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 5, 2010 12:28:36 GMT
A.E.D. Smith - The Coat. Probably the first real quality drop in the series, with the very ordinary, slightly daft actually, tale of a man being chased around a dilapidated house by an old coat until he remembers to point a cross at it and stab it with a poker. Amelia B Edwards - The Four-Fifteen Express. For some reason (quite possibly because I was on the InterCity out of Paddington, bound for Probert Towers with the lovely Lady P at my side) I really enjoyed this otherwise quite ordinary and almost 'cosy' ghostly tale of a railway carriage haunted by the embezzling Mr Dwerrihouse. Patrick Davis - Sally. The inspiration for the cover of the book. Sally's a ghost who haunts the beach where she and her father died in a boat wreck. This one's written rather oddly, being topped and tailed with the discovery of a journal, which has been written in the third person. Even the line 'David always wrote about himself in the third person' doesn't really stop you from thinking that either some serious rewriting has taken place here (the story is a little bit all over the shop at the end) or an excuse was needed to up the word count for pecuniary reasons 
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Post by dem on Jul 5, 2010 12:37:36 GMT
very pleased you've reached this one, Lord P. I get the impression people think i'm gaga for praising the RCH-edited Fontana Ghosts but did he really do such a bad job? Admittedly, some of his selections (or, come to that, the more throwaway stories among his own contributions) may not be all that "great", but he encouraged a number of the day's new and contemporary authors even if (tellingly?) there would be nothing of Aickman's from now on.
oddly, i never went a bundle on #9, but reading through your remarks i can only wonder what was up with me at the time as i've remembered all of them!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 6, 2010 7:50:43 GMT
Ann Bridge - The Song in the House. Big old house. Lonely daughter who said no to a marriage proposal. Gorgeous ghostly girl in a red dress. Harpsichord recital of Elizabethan music. A recipe for all sorts of splendid gothic shenanigans here, but unfortunately this story doesn't really go anywhere at all with these elements. All right if you like your stories very gentle indeed, with a touch of melancholy.
Roger Hicks - The Glove. After 'The Coat' - 'The Glove'! The glove's not haunted, thank goodness, but it serves as a reminder to our hero as to just who it was who pulled him out of the ice in the Antarctic, which I think is a great setting for a ghost story and hasn't been used enough.
Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray. And what a return! Crashing through the ceiling as a rotting corpse! This one's also in the Wagner & Wise 'Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural', even though RCH says in his introduction that he 'cannot understand why it has not been anthologised before'.
R Chetwynd Hayes - The Liberated Tiger. Another of RCH's 'middle of the road' ghost stories - nothing special but not terrible either. Husband's on the point of death and his wife keeps seeing a younger, fitter, more Grim Reaper-like vision of him wandering their home. RCH admits it was written in his 'blind' style and I must admit I didn't see the ending coming. It does contain the usual RCH attitude to the ladies though - the wife is selfish and nagging and at one point a fat frumpy nurse turns up as well.
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Post by dem on Jul 6, 2010 8:10:36 GMT
for what it's worth, here's my dead long-winded take on The Liberated Tiger:
Roland ... her Roland, was keeping true to form, but his ordinariness, his apparent simplicity, seemed to have sinister undertones. That thing that walked while he slept was as much part of him as the mild, compliant husband she had known for years.
Roland is bedridden and dying. Mary, his devoted wife of fifty years, is doing her duty by him as one would expect - she's always had his best interests at heart. But does he realise that all her nagging and 'advice' were for his own good? "While there is breath in my body, I will never reproach you".
That's hardly a great comfort in the circumstances, because whenever Roland lapses into unconsciousness, his doppelganger walks the house. He is the liberated Roland, the one who wanted children, the one who wanted to take a chance on that risky business venture, the one who wanted to do so many things that she wouldn't allow. And for this Roland hates her.
Chetwynd-Hayes chose to debut this story in Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories #9, the first he edited after taking over from Robert Aickman, and its powerful stuff . He seems to have a tighter rein on the plot than was often the case, and the climax is terrific. As with so much of his work it reads like a fierce justification of his own bachelorhood.
Overall, i think RCH got off to a respectable start to his career as series editor. Interesting that he entirely ditched his often lamented sense of humour for the occasion and worked in a fair number of sad and/ or gentle tales. It wasn't to stay that way for long, mind.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 6, 2010 9:16:47 GMT
He seems to have a tighter rein on the plot than was often the case, and the climax is terrific. As with so much of his work it reads like a fierce justification of his own bachelorhood. Overall, i think RCH got off to a respectable start to his career as series editor. Interesting that he entirely ditched his often lamented sense of humour for the occasion and worked in a fair number of sad and/ or gentle tales. It wasn't to stay that way for long, mind. I'd agree with all of that, and I did like that ending! On a more general note, I find I'm rather sad at getting to the end of my Fontana box of Great Ghost Story books so I've ordered another seven of the buggers at bargain prices, including the missing Aickmans (3,4 & 8). So you'll probably get to read some of my thoughts on those and the later RCHs in a while as well. |
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Post by dem on Jul 6, 2010 9:48:37 GMT
Will look forward to that! RCH used a number of the authors who contributed to Mary Danby's Frighteners mini-series so i'm certain you'll get on with them. While we're talking number 9, we mustn't overlook -
'Ex-Private X’ (A. M. Burrage) – The Sweeper: Tessa Winyard, 22, is engaged as female companion to eighty-year-old Miss Ludgate of Billingdon Abbots. The old lady has a reputation for meanness which makes her extravagant gestures toward passing tramps and beggars all the more inexplicable. Miss Ludgate has her reasons. Eighteen years earlier an emaciated man called at the Abbots and after castigating him as a workshy scrounger she set him to work clearing all the leaves from the path. After a few sweeps he fell to the ground and with his dying breath promised to complete the job and “I’ll come for you, my lady, and we’ll feast together. Only see as you’re ready to be fetched when I come”. Since then his spectre has returned each autumn and with each passing year he draws closer to the house …
Muriel Spark possibly had vague memories of the story in mind when she wrote her famous ghost story The Leaf Sweeper featuring council worker and ex-asylum inmate Johnnie Geddes, founder of the Society For The Abolition Of Christmas.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 6, 2010 13:07:38 GMT
Will look forward to that! RCH used a number of the authors who contributed to Mary Danby's Frighteners mini-series so i'm certain you'll get on with them. While we're talking number 9, we mustn't overlook - 'Ex-Private X’ (A. M. Burrage) – The Sweeper: Muriel Spark possibly had vague memories of the story in mind when she wrote her famous ghost story The Leaf Sweeper featuring council worker and ex-asylum inmate Johnnie Geddes, founder of the Society For The Abolition Of Christmas. It's the last one left in the book for me to read! The Muriel Spark sounds fun - any idea which of the works in the vast and winding corridors of the Probert Towers library it might be in? |
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Post by jonathan122 on Jul 6, 2010 16:08:12 GMT
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Post by dem on Jul 6, 2010 16:35:55 GMT
good man, Jonathan. I believe Lord P. will find his copy somewhere in the new annexe to the South Wing (formerly known as 'the County of Somerset').
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Post by cw67q on Jul 6, 2010 19:35:24 GMT
Will look forward to that! RCH used a number of the authors who contributed to Mary Danby's Frighteners mini-series so i'm certain you'll get on with them. While we're talking number 9, we mustn't overlook - 'Ex-Private X’ (A. M. Burrage) – The Sweeper: Muriel Spark possibly had vague memories of the story in mind when she wrote her famous ghost story The Leaf Sweeper featuring council worker and ex-asylum inmate Johnnie Geddes, founder of the Society For The Abolition Of Christmas. It's the last one left in the book for me to read! The Muriel Spark sounds fun - any idea which of the works in the vast and winding corridors of the Probert Towers library it might be in? It's a fine story, one of Burrage's best. BTW I've not really had time to post anything for the last week or so, but I have been popping in for a browse now and then and I have enjoyed the on-going posts, particularly in the Fontana and Blackwood threads. I can't remember if I mentioned it earlier, but a few years back some of us tried to get an on-line ghostly reading group up and running based around ther Aickman Fontanas. It was an idea that would have worked if the timing had been right, but it ground to a halt after a few months. Sometimes the web is busier than others... Anyway the relics of the old threads can be found on the yahoo group: groups.yahoo.com/group/Haunted_Bookshelf/There was another attempt at a similar group, not based on the Fontanas later at: groups.yahoo.com/group/FiresideFrights/?yguid=160738518This latter was run an an exemplarly matter by a hard working moderator, but unfortuantely died through lack of activity. Again unfortunate timing, but some archives are still up. Oops, second half starting... - chris |
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Post by cw67q on Jul 6, 2010 20:50:51 GMT
Edith Wharton - The Lady Maid's Bell. 'Hartley', a lady's maid who has just recovered from 'the typhoid' gets employed at the kind of isolated grim country house with a history of dead children that we all know and love. The servants are lovely, her mistress is very delicate and her only pleasure is handsome Mr Hanson who lives in the house across the way. Odd then that her piggy eyed scarlet-faced, easily-prone-to-bouts-of-insane-temper husband gets on with him so well. The ghost of the previous maid has the answer to it all, or does she? I must confess I read this twice & still didn't really understand what happened at the end.  I'm so glad you said that, John, I've read this tale at least twice with some years in between and I found the ending confusing on both occasions. I like Edwards' ghost tales, but "afterwards", "Pomegranate Seed" & "Mr Brown" are all better choices. - chris |
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 6, 2010 21:02:37 GMT
Edith Wharton - The Lady Maid's Bell. 'Hartley', a lady's maid who has just recovered from 'the typhoid' gets employed at the kind of isolated grim country house with a history of dead children that we all know and love. The servants are lovely, her mistress is very delicate and her only pleasure is handsome Mr Hanson who lives in the house across the way. Odd then that her piggy eyed scarlet-faced, easily-prone-to-bouts-of-insane-temper husband gets on with him so well. The ghost of the previous maid has the answer to it all, or does she? I must confess I read this twice & still didn't really understand what happened at the end. I'm so glad you said that, John, I've read this tale at least twice with some years in between and I found the ending confusing on both occasions. I like Edwards' ghost tales, but "afterwards", "Pomegranate Seed" & "Mr Brown" are all better choices. - chris I'm glad it wasn't just me, and I was hoping someone could explain it! Have you read much of her, Chris? I have a collection that I'm starting and certainly the first story 'The Fullness of Life' has an interesting (and very much a female) take on how one might spend eternity in the afterlife. I'm hoping if I read a few more it may give me an insight into this one. That's how dedicated I am  |
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Post by cw67q on Jul 6, 2010 21:21:33 GMT
I'm so glad you said that, John, I've read this tale at least twice with some years in between and I found the ending confusing on both occasions. I like Edwards' ghost tales, but "afterwards", "Pomegranate Seed" & "Mr Brown" are all better choices. - chris I'm glad it wasn't just me, and I was hoping someone could explain it! Have you read much of her, Chris? I have a collection that I'm starting and certainly the first story 'The Fullness of Life' has an interesting (and very much a female) take on how one might spend eternity in the afterlife. I'm hoping if I read a few more it may give me an insight into this one. That's how dedicated I am Hi John, I bought the Tartarus collection when it came out. I had previously read most of the stories in an American pb edition, I can't remember if I read all of the tales in the Tartarus, but I do like her stories (naturally I've never read any of her famous mainstream novels ). I think the collection is pretty solid throughout. There is a uk pb in print edited by Peter Hains, but I generally avoid most of Hains' books since reading about his tendency to make editorial changes to older stories and alter titles so that sometimes what apear to be unread tales (don't recognise that title) turn out to be a little more familar than expected  - chris |
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I'm so glad you said that, John, I've read this tale at least twice with some years in between and I found the ending confusing on both occasions. I like Edwards' ghost tales, but "afterwards", "Pomegranate Seed" & "Mr Brown" are all better choices.
