Richard Dalby - Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2

[jonathan122]

The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2 - ed. Richard Dalby (Robinson 1991)

Preface - Christopher Lee
Who or What Was It? - Kingsley Amis
The Believers - Robert Arthur
A Happy Release - Sabine Baring-Gould
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe - Nugent Barker
The Man Who Went Too Far - E. F. Benson
The Secret of Macarger's Gulch - Ambrose Bierce
The God with Four Arms - H. T. W. Bousfield
The Shadowy Escort - A. M. Burrage
The Widow's Clock - Bernard Capes
A Pleasant Evening - Robert W. Chambers
The Elemental - R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Something to Reflect Upon - Clare Colvin
The Second Passenger - Basil Copper
No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince - Ralph A. Cram
St. Bartholomew's Day - Edmund Crispin
The Ghost in Master B.'s Room - Charles Dickens
The Brown Hand - Arthur Conan Doyle
Yak Mool San - H. B. Drake
The Spirit of Christmas - Vivian Edwards
Uncle Christian's Inheritance - Erckmann-Chatrian
The Black Widow - John S. Glasby
Across the Moors - William Fryer Harvey
The Gray Champion - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Governor Manco and the Soldier - Washinton Irving
Rats - M. R. James
Madelein - Roger Johnson
And Turns No More His Head - A. F. Kidd
By Word of Mouth - Rudyard Kipling
The Curse of the Stillborn - Margery Lawrence
Dance! Dance! The Shaking of the Sheets - Alan W. Lear
The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Haunted Air - L. A. Lewis
The Coxswain of the Lifeboat - R. H. Malden
On the River - Guy de Maupassant
Things - J. C. Moore
The Ebony Frame - Edith Nesbit
The Downs - Amyas Northcote
The Pot of Tulips - Fitz-James O'Brien
The Burned House - Vincent O'Sullivan
The Unfinished Masterpiece - C. D. Pamely
The Witches' Sabbath - James Platt
Metzengerstein - Edgar Allan Poe
The Story of Saddler's Croft - K. and H. Pritchard
The Face - Lennox Robinson
A Fisher of Men - David G. Rowlands
A Mysterious Portrait - Mark Rutherford
Ward 8 - Pamela Sewell
The Coat - A. E. D. Smith
A Voice in Feathers - Lewis Spence
A Dream of Porcelain - Derek Stanford
No. 11 Welham Square - Herbert Stephen
The Bishop's Ghost and the Printer's Baby - Frank R. Stockton
The Secret of the Growing Gold - Bram Stoker
The Ash Track - Mark Valentine
In a Nursing Home - E. H. Visiak
The Stranger of the Night - Edgar Wallace
The Triumph of the Night - Edith Wharton
The Hall Bedroom - Mary E. Wilkins
The Ghost at the "Blue Dragon" - William J. Wintle

[dem]

Thanks for posting and reminding me this one existed Jonathan. If I remember, wasn't this the book that suffered from dreadful distribution problems on publication? Anyhow, for me the story that always springs to mind is Roger Johnson's Elizabeth Bathory outing Madelein - i loved it at the time and maybe 19 years is a safe enough distance to revisit it .

here's some notes to get things going. all of it recycled rubbish, i'm afraid so don't be afraid to skip rest of this post.

Kingsley Amis - Who Or What Was It?: His short sequel to The Green Man. Amis and his wife Jane stop off at a pub on their way home from Milnethorne to Barnet and he works himself into a tizzy over a string of remarkable-ish coincidences: the landlord's name is Allington, his deputy for the evening is Palmer and the barman is Fred - just like they are in his (excellent) work of fiction. As with the novel, this Mr. Allington has a young daughter and, if tonight is to get any weirder, there's a chance that a huge creature of twigs and leaves will attempt to destroy her. Amis and his wife agree that there's only one thing for it - he'll have to keep watch and make sure nothing untoward happens to the girl ...

Basil Copper - The Second Passenger: Reginald Braintree and Samuel Briggs have detested each other ever since Braintree first joined Mr. Steyning's Cheapside firm as an office boy. Mr. Steyning has now retired and the old sparring partners are now senior partners when Braintree discovers Briggs' flair for embezzling company funds. When he confronts his enemy with the evidence, a scuffle ensues and Briggs is accidentally killed. Braintree doesn't fancy explaining what happened to the police, so he disposes of the corpse in a reputedly bottomless swamp. It must have been The Sucking Pit or something because, as Braintree takes the commuter train home from Charing Cross, a trail of slimy footprints lead down the corridor toward his compartment ....

William Fryer Harvey - Across The Moors: Little Peggy is poorly and her governess, Miss Craig is sent to fetch a doctor at dead of night. This enquires her to pass the reputedly haunted Redman's Cross, scene of a horrific murder. Having left her message at Tebbits Farm, lucky Miss Craig meets a stranger who volunteers to escort her home ...

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Elemental: Surrey. Reginald Warren has an elemental attach itself to his shoulder on the tube during the rush hour. Clapham-based Clairvoyant Madame Orloff, who happens to be in the same compartment, offers to rid him of the fast-growing parasite (for her usual fee), but Reginald thinks she's nuts and is glad to escape as his stop, where his wife Susan is waiting for him in a backless sun-suit. Unusually for RCH, theirs is a happy marriage ... or it is until the elemental mauls Susan, whereupon Reginald relents and hires Madame O. By way of exorcism, the clairvoyant chants some toe-curlingly unfunny doggerel and that certainly gets rid of the tenacious entity, but once she's scarpered and the coast is clear, it returns to settle the score.

L. A. Lewis - Haunted Air: "Apart from its extraordinary shade of pulsating, unnatural green, the object was quite evidently not a bird, and he might momentarily have dubbed it a grotesque toy balloon ... but for the fact that it was so obviously - and somehow horribly alive. Carr described it as resembling a monstrous monkey, clambering with incredible speed up an invisible rope."

A series of mysterious light aircraft crashes claim the lives of a succession of experienced pilots and their passengers. Ace record-breaker Pitchmann sneers at Carr's death, dismissing him as an amateur and a lightweight, and takes to the skies in unpromising weather to prove how great he is. Meanwhile at the bar, Beckett gives his alarming take on the recent tragedies.

Amyas Northcote - The Downs: The narrator, a Londoner holidaying at a farm, learns that walking the Branksome Downs after dark is not without its perils. Especially this night when the restless dead rise up from the earth.

Ralph Adams Cram - No. 252 Rue M. le Prince : Cram's reworking of Bulwer-Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters which he relocates to a sinister hotel in Paris. Features a truly horrible, slimy succubus which attempts to smother the narrator. David Davies writes (in Gothic Short Stories) "in Cram's story, as in H. R. Giger's art-designs for Alien, a Gothic of the female body seems to be pathologically embedded in a way that goes beyond traditional misogyny and the traditional repertoire of Gothic anxieties."

[cauldronbrewer]

I'm around halfway through the book. So far, it's a solid mix of stories with only a few clunkers. Dalby certainly favors the old school approach; no surprise that his notes refer to the first M. R. James collection as "the single most important book in the twentieth-century literature of the supernatural."

The Amis story was interesting, but I suspect it would resonate more if I'd read The Green Man.

I've run across Arthur's "The Believers" a couple of times before; I remember liking it a good deal. He's an under-appreciated writer.

I recently read Barker's "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" in Hugh Lamb's Star Book of Horror 2. It's a cryptic and creepy fairly tale nightmare. Highly recommended, even if I'm not certain exactly what happened in it.

Baring-Gould's light-hearted "The Happy Release" amused me. On the other hand, the "humorous" Dickens piece is easily my least favorite so far--I had a hard time finishing it, and I say that as someone who once finished Hard Times (I really didn't mean to do that; the sentence just wrote itself, I swear).

Browsing back over Benson's "The Man Who Went to Far" reminded me of an anthology idea that no one (as far as I can recall) has ever used: a book of Pan (as opposed to a Pan book). Other potential stories could include David Riley's "The Satyr's Head," Algernon Blackwood's "Roman Ruins," C. L. Moore's "Daemon," Saki's "The Music on the Hill," Henry S. Whitehead's "The People of Pan," and, of course, Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan."

[dem]

Mar 1, 2012 2:38:18 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Browsing back over Benson's "The Man Who Went to Far" reminded me of an anthology idea that no one (as far as I can recall) has ever used: a book of Pan (as opposed to a Pan book). Other potential stories could include David Riley's "The Satyr's Head," Algernon Blackwood's "Roman Ruins," C. L. Moore's "Daemon," Saki's "The Music on the Hill," Henry S. Whitehead's "The People of Pan," and, of course, Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan."

I'll add Elliott O'Donnell's The Pan Night Mystery to the recommendations. There's also a Jules De Grandin adventure, The Great God Pan, though all i can remember is the Scooby Doo "It was the Mayor/ Headmaster/ upstanding pillar of the community/ dressed up all along!" ending.

[cauldronbrewer]

Mar 2, 2012 12:34:00 GMT dem said:

There's also a Jules De Grandin adventure, The Great God Pan, though all i can remember is the Scooby Doo "It was the Mayor/ Headmaster/ upstanding pillar of the community/ dressed up all along!" ending.

Right, that one's in The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin. I think it has something to do with a sleazy villain who uses a paper mache mask of Pan to keep his nubile female pagan followers in line. And it was the professor all along! Definitely on the sillier end of the Seabury Quinn spectrum.

[jamesdoig]

Mar 2, 2012 12:34:00 GMT dem said:

Mar 1, 2012 2:38:18 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Browsing back over Benson's "The Man Who Went to Far" reminded me of an anthology idea that no one (as far as I can recall) has ever used: a book of Pan (as opposed to a Pan book). Other potential stories could include David Riley's "The Satyr's Head," Algernon Blackwood's "Roman Ruins," C. L. Moore's "Daemon," Saki's "The Music on the Hill," Henry S. Whitehead's "The People of Pan," and, of course, Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan."

Plus M. John Harrison's "Great God Pan" in Prime Evil.

And there's a "Great God Pan" piss-take called "The Great Pan-Demon: An Unspeakable Story" by Arthur Sykes from 1895 that was reprinted in an issue of Aklo. This crappy scan from the National Observer is probably unreadable:

[cauldronbrewer]

Mar 2, 2012 20:18:16 GMT jamesdoig said:

Plus M. John Harrison's "Great God Pan" in Prime Evil.

And there's a "Great God Pan" piss-take called "The Great Pan-Demon: An Unspeakable Story" by Arthur Sykes from 1895 that was reprinted in an issue of Aklo.

I've heard of Harrison's story but haven't read it. I'd never heard of the Skyes story--it looks interesting. Apparently it was also reprinted in an anthology of parodies titled At the Mountains of Murkiness (Ferret Fantasy, 1973; the cover is by "Virgil Filigree").

I forgot to mention Lester del Rey's "The Pipes of Pan" (which I like but which may be a bit twee for this forum).

Getting back to Dalby's selections, here are few more of my favorites:

Yak Mool San - H. B. Drake
An Englishman in Japanese-occupied Korea decides to go on a hunting trip. When the locals warn him about an ill-reputed mountain, he naturally decides to check it out. He finds an abandoned city and a friendly hermit who tells him the story of an ancient curse.

Madelein - Roger Johnson
The narrator says a sad farewell to his female best friend, whose playwright boss has dispatched her to Central Europe to find Elisabeth Bathory's long-lost iron maiden. Take it away, Eddie:

Oh well, wherever, wherever you are
Iron Maiden's gonna get you, no matter how far

And No More Turns His Head - A. F. Kidd
The narrator, whose hobby is bell-ringing, learns to her surprise that her obnoxious ad agency colleague has written a computer program to automate bell-ringing. She's even more surprised when he shows up at her church to examine the bells. Unfortunately for him, his comments arouse the ire of a decidedly unpleasant ghost: "an odd, humped figure . . . completely covered by a kind of robe or cloak, made from some material which gleamed wetly where the light shone on it."

[dem]

Not really my thing, but here's a pdf of Sykes' The Great Pan-Demon if you wanna download it (you'll have to be logged in). As James said, it was reissued in the Winter 1990/ 91 issue of Aklo. Editors Mark Valentine & Roger Dobson mention a second contemporary parody of Machen's masterpiece, Arthur Rickett's' A Yellow Creeper (1895), though they're not so hot on that one: "rather feeble and petty .... The Great Pan-Demon has much more panache. Its author could clearly have concocted the genuine article had he so wished."

Attachments:

[cauldronbrewer]

Thanks! Now I know what it feels to be assaulted by someone wielding a medical dictionary in one hand and a horror writers' concordance in the other.

[ripper]

Browsing through our library's online catalogue, I spied a volume titled "The World's Greatest Ghost Stories." Not having heard of it before, I reserved it, but was rather disappointed to find out upon collection that it was just RD's Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories under a different name, and I already own a copy of that volume. I was just wondering if anyone knew if Mammoth Ghost Stories 2 was also published under another title. Having reserved it from the library, I wasn't out of pocket at all, rather I was looking forward to delving into another of RD's superb anthologies, only to be so disappointed as I found out it wasn't a new collection. Ah, well, never mind, that's how it goes sometimes :-).

[ripper]

I did get around to buying a copy of Mammoth Ghost Stories 2 and am gradually going through it. Lewis' Haunted Air reminded me of H.G. Wells' Horror of the Heights, and of the two I think I slightly prefer Wells.

[ripper]

'St. Bartholomew's Day' by Edmund Crispin was very reminiscent of James' 'Count Magnus,' with a hint of 'Oh, Whistle...' for good measure.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Crispin was a big James fan.

[ripper]

I can't recall reading anything else by Crispin, so not sure if he produced any other pastiches of James.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Practically all of Crispin's novels (humorous detective stories about the eccentric Gervase Fen) have Jamesian elements, and at least one of them has a complete ghost story in it (I forget which one, though).