Horowitz Horror

[lemming13]

While clearing off my son's old bookcase ready for building and loading the new one, I came across a number of books we'd both forgotten (most of which his sister ran off with immediately). Among them were a couple of short paperbacks by Anthony Horowitz, glorious veteran of so many great tv series, and so many excellent books and novelisations. Each contained two or three short horror stories. The Night Bus was his favourite, but he also enjoyed Twist Cottage. Then we realised that he had two more omnibuses, Horowitz Horror volumes 1 and 2, which contained all those stories and more, so sis gets to keep the samplers. Horowitz does write as if for adults, and is not afraid to get gruesome; if it disturbed my son's equilibrium, it's either very unsettling, or about dogs (or possibly My Little Pony). He also recommends the Power of Five series, especially the latest one, Necropolis.

[dem]

i'm glad you mentioned this as Horowitz Horrors came up recently on the Michel Parry Mayflower Black Magic 2 thread where a couple of us were enthusing over his scripts for Midsomer Murders (we really are rubbish at staying on-topic !). Just the title, The Night Bus, is enough to send me out hunting down the Omnibus in the library tomorrow.

Later:

Anthony Horowitz - Twist Cottage (Pocket Horowitz, Orchard 2002)

Cover illustrations: Larry Rostant

Twist Cottage
Harriet's Horrible Dream

Blurb:
Two spooky stories guaranteed to give you nightmares.
All the previous owners of Twist Cottage have died suddenly. Surely a coincidence, thinks Ben. But is it?
Harriet is having a horrible dream, but any minute now she'll wake up and it will all be OK ... won't it?

Aug 22, 2010 15:39:04 GMT lemming13 said:

While clearing off my son's old bookcase ready for building and loading the new one, I came across a number of books we'd both forgotten (most of which his sister ran off with immediately). Among them were a couple of short paperbacks by Anthony Horowitz, glorious veteran of so many great tv series, and so many excellent books and novelisations. Each contained two or three short horror stories. The Night Bus was his favourite, but he also enjoyed Twist Cottage. Then we realised that he had two more omnibuses, Horowitz Horror volumes 1 and 2, which contained all those stories and more, so sis gets to keep the samplers. Horowitz does write as if for adults, and is not afraid to get gruesome; if it disturbed my son's equilibrium, it's either very unsettling, or about dogs (or possibly My Little Pony). He also recommends the Power of Five series, especially the latest one, Necropolis.

Still waiting on Horowitz Horrors but i found two slimline Pocket Horrors in the library yesterday. Mr. Horowitz has made a very favourable first impression - on the strength of the winningly dark Twist Cottage and gleefully ghoulish Harriet's Horrible Dream, he's a one-man Mary Danby's 'Frighteners' - and i intend that as a huge compliment.

Twist Cottage: Fourteen year old Ben Taylor and his father, Andrew, have lived alone at their Wiltshire home since Mrs Taylor was killed in a car accident the year Ben was born. Mr. Taylor is a history lecturer at Bristol University and it's here he meets and falls for mature student Louise. Within three months of their hasty marriage, Louise shows her true colours and they are deeply unpleasant ones. She drinks. She lounges. She commands. In short, she is a spiteful-tongued gold-digger who threatens to ruin Andrew - with extras - rather than grant him a divorce. On her insistence, they move out of their pleasant town-house to the countryside and the remote Twist Cottage on the outskirts of Bradford-Upon-Avon. Ben wonders if his father knows Twist Cottage's recent history; six different couples have lived there in the past few years and the women among them have all met with grisly ends ....

To give away more would be rotten and mean, but what happens once the Taylor's move in is certainly macabre enough, i can tell you that, and the pay off is satisfyingly grim.

Harriet's Horrible Dream: Spoilt brat Harriet Hubbard lives in a huge house in Bath, financed by her father Guy's time-share scams and shady dealings in the antiques business (he fleeces the recently widowed). Harriet demands her own way in all things, and to date has had three French nannies sacked for not pampering to her whims as they should. And then - the dream. Guy returns home to tell wife Hilda that they're bankrupt. They'll have to sell up and move to a one-room house in Bletchley. Hilda and Harriet can forget all about that luxury Caribbean cruise they were looking forward to, and Harriet will have to go to a state school from now on. Fifi, the nanny, has been dismissed with immediate effect. Harriet's screaming fit brings about a compromise. Mr. Hubbard tells her she can go live with her gruesome uncle Algernon in London at his exclusive Kings Road restaurant, Sawney Bean, where the jaded affluent flock to enjoy "a completely different eating experience" ....

Anthony Horowitz - The Phone Goes Dead (Pocket Horowitz, Orchard 2002)

The Phone Goes Dead
Bath Night

Two dark tales to curdle your blood.
David's mobile won't stop ringing, but these are no ordinary callers. He seems to have a hot-line to heaven ... or hell.
Isabel has a nasty feeling that the Victorian bath her parents have installed is waiting for her. But it won't be a bubble bath she gets, more of a bloodbath.

The Phone Goes Dead: Ventnor, Isle of Wight. Mark Adams buys his sixteen year old son David a second-hand mobile phone. The previous owner died when she was struck by lightening in Hyde Park while using it to call Steve, and somehow it has become an emergency line for those on the other side of the grave who pester David to pass on messages to their loved ones. When it becomes too much for him, David takes to leaving the mobile indoors - and that's how he's able to call home to his parents when he's involved in a coach crash.

Bath Night: Muswell Hill, North London. Twelve year old Isabel's ever-sparring parents buy an ugly antique bathtub from a Fulham salvage yard. Isabel does her best to avoid the tub after some terrifying experiences including a near drowning, yet her parents use it with no problems whatsoever. A visit to the salesman reveals the bath was that in which Jacob Marlin, the Victorian axe-murderer, chopped up his several female victims. Only one thing for it. Isabel arms herself with a monkey wrench. "But the bath was waiting for her" ...

Another winner and plenty horrible with it. On the little i've read so far Mr. H has a knack for a strong ending.

There are at least another four Pocket Horowtz's derived from Horowitz Horrors - The Night Bus, Burnt, Scared and Killer Camera- but at £3.99 a time, you really are better off getting the books proper.

[dem]

Anthony Horowitz - Horowitz Horror: Stories You'll Wish You Never Read (Orchard, 1999)

Larry Rostant

Bath Night
Killer Camera
Light Moves
The Night Bus
Harriet’s Horrible Dream
Scared
A Career in Computer Games
The Man with the Yellow Face
The Monkey’s Ear

Blurb:
It's a world where everything seems nice and normal to begin with. But the weird, the surprising and the truly terrifying are always lurking just out of sight. Like an ordinary-looking camera with secret, evil powers: a bus ride home that turns into your worst nightmare: and a mysterious computer game that absolutely no-one would play ... if they knew the rules!

Horowitz Horror is a wicked collection of tales of the macabre from acclaimed author and television screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz.

Whatever you do, don't take this book to bed with you.

Killer Camera: Matthew King, fourteen, buys the Pentax at a Crouch End car-boot sale as a present for his father's fiftieth birthday. According to the seller, it was left behind by three art-students who absconded without settling for their rent. Matthew tests it out on a mirror which smashes seconds afterward. His delighted father then experiments with shots of the cherry tree in their back garden and Polonius, the family dog. The tree inexplicably withers and dies, the dog is splattered across Wolsely Road by a careless motorist ....

Matthew visits the chemist with the roll of undeveloped film that came with the camera. The twenty-four snaps depict the three art-students and friends conducting a nude black magic ritual in a derelict house where their cat sacrifice evidently summoned a demon ....

Matthew rushes home to destroy the camera, only to learn his family have taken it along with them to Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. Can he reach them before Dad gets busy snapping all that moves?

This one reassures that opener Bath Night isn't a lucky one off and Horowitz means too continue as he began. Those familiar with a certain boring v*mp*re hoax will surely recognise the incident upon which the cat killing/ nude ritual sequence is based. ;D

Light Moves: Young Henry Marsh inherits the beat-up Zincom computer that, until recently, belonged to Ethan Sly, racing correspondent with the Ipswich News, who keeled over with a massive heart attack while watching the Grand National. The late Mr. Sly sends Henry his tips of the day via the computer monitor even when the machine isn't plugged in. Unfortunately ex-school bully and local ne'er do well Bill Garrett muscles in on the action. A computer like that is just what he needs to fund his hourly excursions to the Off licence and fag shop.

The Night Bus: Nick Hancock, seventeen, and his twelve-year-old brother Jeremy, miss their lift home from a Halloween party in Holborn. At Trafalgar Square they spot an old fashioned red bus heading for Richmond, but there's no driver, no lights to suggest it's in service. They climb aboard out of the cold and eventually the motor starts. A thin, white faced, long haired conductor with sunken eyes takes their fare and the 227B pulls away. The living dead have been out on the lash and someone has to drive them home to their respective West London cemeteries ....

A must for Vault's exciting imaginary On The Buses horror anthology.

[dem]

Scared: Suffolk. Mobile acne farm Gary Wilson, fifteen, is lost in the fields surrounding grandma's cottage on the outskirts of East Soham. Back in Notting Hill, Gary is the official school bully, grooving to Heavy Metal Hits in his Bart Simpson t-shirt and putting the fear up small-fry, but out here it's his turn to be scared. As his temper grows, so he deliberately flaunts the country code in every vandal way he can think of until nature strikes back. Once the police have called off their search, Gary's long-suffering mother returns home, leaving him doomed to model for the cover of The Seventh Black Book Of Horror!

A Career in Computer Games: Kevin Graham, ignorant school-leaver, thief, burglar and all round tommy-rotter, has only one interest in life; playing computer games. So when he sees that Galactic Games are looking to recruit a useless numb-skull on a huge salary, he makes for their shabby offices in Rupert Street, Soho. The strangely strange Miss Toe & Mr. Go recruit him to work on - or rather, work in - the X-treme version of Smash Crash Slash 500 on £2,000 a week, a car of his choice, plus health-care and funeral package. The latter, of course, is purely an unnecessary precaution. By the time Kevin gets home to Camden Town, his first day at the office has already begun as a waxwork-like armed assassin takes aim at his face ....

The Man with the Yellow Face: While his mum and dad get on with the business of divorcing one another, the thirteen year old son is sent to stay with his kindly Aunt and Uncle in York. Just before taking the train back home to mum in London, he puts £2.50 in a photo kiosk at York Station. The four prints when developed show three of him - and one of an ugly old man with something terribly wrong with his skin. The youngster takes this as a warning not to board the train - there may be an escaped mental patient aboard or "one of those suicide bombers you read about in the Middle East" - but his relatives are insistent. As the express passes under a bridge at Grantham ....

Another that wouldn't be out of place in an adult anthology. If final story The Monkey's Ear lives up to the rest then this is among the most enjoyable collections of horror stories i've read this year. And the even better news is .....

Anthony Horowitz - More Bloody Horowitz (Walker, September, 2010)

Mick Brownfield

Blurb

It may look like a book of innocent fables for nice, well-mannered boys and girls, but beneath the cosy exterior, this is Anthony Horowitz at his most wicked...

Stories of ultimate revenge, from freshly sold human meat, and reality TV where death is the penalty, to a car that leads its driver to his death at an abattoir, and a snake-charmer's human curse - all told with dark humour and gruesome relish.

He's got a new one out! With a dead ropey cover!

Hannes Bok

Ahem

[Craig Herbertson]

I must admit that particular pose is so 'Weird Tales'. I was obsessed as a kid with those wonderful magazines and their art. There was one story where a guy is chased round and round a track by a skeleton. Gave me the heeby jeebys. The whole ethos of them, the smell of the paper, the implicit sexuality, the adverts for X-ray specs.., the bizarre Americanisms and the dollar signs. Ropey it is but its generic predecessors were just fantastic

[dem]

Same thing, Craig. it was the Peter Haining book Peter Haining – Terror! A History Of Horror Illustrations From The Pulp Magazines (Sphere, 1978) that got me wondering 'if this is the artwork what must the stories be like?' Terror! introduced me to the nightmarish talents of John Newton Howitt, Marion Brundage, Lee Coye, Hannes Bok .... just about all my favourite illustrators. it really is a friend for life, that one.

and to round off Horowitz Horror which is no slouch itself.

The Monkey's Ear: "Sod off, Sinbad!" Stupid, racist Eenglish tourists Brian and Brenda Becker invade a Marrakesh market with twelve-year-old son Bart who persuades them to part with £30 (approx.) for the ugly titular organ which, they are assured, guarantees the owner four wishes. Unfortunately, when the Becker's return home to Stanmore, North London, too late they discover the monkey's ear is not in full working order ....

Depending on your perspective, Horowitz gains or loses a credibility point for attributing The Monkey's Paw to "Edgar Allan Poe" (i so love stuff that gets the pedants beating their pompous chests!) but my only gripe is the story could have been so much nastier. Still, i've had a bloody brilliant time with this collection and am looking forward to chasing up his others as a matter of some urgency.

[dem]

Anthony Horowitz - More Horowitz Horror: More Stories You'll Wish You Never Read (Orchard, 2000)

Larry Rostant

The Hitchhiker
The Sound of Murder
Burnt
Flight 715
Howard's End
The Lift
The Phone Goes Dead
Twist Cottage
The Shortest Horror Story Ever Written

Blurb
Ever pictured your own funeral? You won't be able to help it when you read some of the stories in this nightmarish collection, where things are never what they appear. Funerals are just the beginning. How about a day at the beach that ends in a mischievous murder? Or a cell phone that has a direct dial to . . . the dead?

About the author
Anthony Horowitz was brought up on horror stories, and his childhood love of all things sinister and scary has stayed with him. He says, 'I think everyone enjoys horror. Not necessarily dead bodies and dripping blood, but the shadows that lie just outside our vision, the secrets hidden behind closed doors.' Many of the stories in this book are inspired by ordinary, everyday objects. A camera. A bath. A computer. But each of them has been given a twist to remind us that even in a safe, predictable world, the horrible and the unexpected are never far away.

Anthony Horowitz is the author of a range of children's books, translated into over a dozen languages. He is also a well known television screenwriter with credits including Poirot, Midsomer Murders, Crime Traveller and the ITV series, Chiller. He lives in North London with his dog, his two sons, Nicholas and Cassian, and his rather scary wife.

Can't get enough of this guy's work just now. i've still not been able to hunt down a copy of More Horowitz Horrors so have taken to reading it in installments via these 80-page (approx) Otchard Black Apple samplers which reprint two or three of the stories at a time. As mentioned above, he's very much a one-man Mary Danby's Frighteners and many of his horror and supernatural tales could easily have made the old Fontana Horrors. Imagine 'Roger Malisson' with a dash of (no kidding - especially in Bath Night and Man With The Yellow face) John Llewelly Probert and you're halfway there. Sample line from the escaped lunatic who has snuck into Orchard's Liverpool Street Offices to tamper with the submitted work by adding (what isn't) The Shortest Horror Story Ever Told: "Now, at last, I hope you can see how gloriously, hideously mad I really am - although for you, perhaps, it may already be too late." Those who enjoy Chris Priestly's Amicus-style ghost and horror stories are likely to have a good time with the Horowitz Horrors.

Cover illustrations: Larry Rostant

Anthony Horowitz - The Night Bus (Orchard, 2002)

The Night Bus
The Hitchhiker
The Man With The Yellow Face

Blurb:
Enter the strange and twisted world of Anthony Horowitz - if you dare!
Three terrifying tales you'll wish you'd never read.
It's Halloween but the living dead on the night bus home aren't trick-or-treaters!
When his dad picks up a hitchhiker, Jacob finds himself in a life-or-death situation. Someone is harbouring a deadly secret.
And who is the man with the yellow face in Peter's passport photo - because it isn't him, is it?

Anthony Horowitz is the master of scary story-telling

Anthony Horowitz - Burnt (Orchard, 2002)

Burnt
The Monkey's Ear
The Shortest Horror Story Ever Written

Blurb:
Two Three creepy stories to send shivers down your spine

Uncle Nigel is determined to get a sun tan, But Tim is sure there's something sinister going on as his uncle's skin starts to frazzle and his brain begins to fry
When Bart buys a magical monkey's ear in a market in Marrakesh, he discovers that making wishes is a dangerous game.

[dem]

Burnt: "Sara has spent the last two days beside the pool under a big sun umbrella reading the latest Stephen King. Nigel doesn't like Stephen King. He gave us a long lecture over dinner about how horror stories are unhealthy and pander to peoples' basest instincts .... whatever that means. Apparently he banned Goosebumps from his school."

Told in diary form. While his mum's having a baby, Tom, thirteen, is sent on holiday to Barbados with his odious Uncle Nigel and Aunt Sara Howard. Mr. Howard is the head teacher at a private school in Wimbledon and something of a martinet. His wife detests him. Conscious that his pupils call him 'porridge' on account of his pasty complexion, Uncle Nigel is determined to acquire a bronze tan and has stocked up on a variety of expensive lotions for the occasion. Blisters, pus-oozing boils, heat-stroke, vomiting attacks, decomposition - nothing can deter him!

The Shortest Horror Story Ever Told: Before he was committed to a secure mental hospital, our homicidal maniac narrator had a horror story rejected by Orchard because it "wasn't frightening enough". Twelve years on, he's on the run from the asylum - and out for revenge on Horowitz's readers.

[dem]

The Hitchhiker: One of Horowitz's finest. To celebrate his thirteenth birthday, Jacob's parents take him to the seaside at Southwold where they enjoy perhaps their happiest day since his brother Eddy fell under a train. But returning home on the A12, Dad makes the fatal mistake of stopping for a hitcher not two miles from 'Fairfields', the institution formerly known as the East Suffolk Maximum Security Prison for the Criminally Insane. When Jacob mishears the mumbling passenger's name as 'Mr. Rellik' he knows he'll have to act fast to save all their lives ....

[Jojo Lapin X]

I ordered all of them. Since coming here I have been reading children's books like crazy. I am not sure how that happened.

[dem]

hope you've not gone for "all" of them jojo because, as mentioned, The Night Bus, Burnt, Twist Cottage et all are samplers, regurgitating material from Horowitz Horrors and More Horowitz Horrors.

Haven't seen a copy of the recently published More Bloody Horowitz yet, but found this rather intriguing blog post, Anthony Horowitz versus other authors by a lady named Rainbowstar, concerning opening story The Man Who Killed Darren Shan ...

[lemming13]

It's not a horror, but as it is a Horowitz I thought I'd slip in a quick mention of The Killing Joke - picked it up in Poundland and just finished it. The story concerns an actor (small-time) who hears an offensive joke and after getting punched out for objecting, starts wondering where jokes start. He tracks the offending joke back and find himself up against a strange secret organisation whose primary agents are an Englishman, an irishman and a Scotsman, but who are not above loosing hordes of nuns, rabbis, racial and sexual stereotypes (and have a spy in the form of a shaggy dog). It isn't a children's book (the sex scene in the Hall of Mirrors at the abandoned funfair is quite stomach-turning), and it doesn't quite come off for me - it never manages to be quite sinister enough, though it does come close. But it is a good, fast read, and for a quid I've no complaints.

[dem]

Oct 25, 2010 12:56:55 GMT lemming13 said:

the sex scene in the Hall of Mirrors at the abandoned funfair is quite stomach-turning

i'm on the case, lemmy! thanks for the tip off.

[dem]

Anthony Horowitz - I Know What You Did Last Wednesday (Walker Books: World Book Day edition, March 2007)

Martin Chatterton

It's dangerous being the younger brother of the world's worst private detective, but Nick Diamond's survived...so far. When the pair receive an invitation to a school reunion on a remote Scottish island, things seem to be looking up. But Nick's got a bad feeling, and it's not indigestion. And when he meets their fellow guests, the feeling only gets worse - especially when they start dying in ever more bizarre ways ...

Another daring charity shop book rescue perpetrated in the name of Vault! i nearly didn't bother - it's clearly aimed at a younger audience than the mighty Horowitz Horrors - but on the plus side it's a mischievous variation on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, it comes in at under 80 pages (so it should be doable in one hit), the cover artwork made me smile and the opening line runs "I like horror stories - but not when they happen to me" ...

[dem]

"There was a face staring at me from the other side of the glass, a hideous skull with hollow eyes and grinning, tombstone teeth. The bones glowed in the moonlight ...."

Private Detective Tim Diamond (i.e., the artist known to his mother as 'Herbert Simple') receives an invitation to a school reunion of past St. Egbert's Comprehensive pupils. Organiser Rory McDougal, reclusive millionaire, is so keen for Diamond to attend that he offers an incentive - first class travel plus £1,000 if he will make the trip to his castle on Scotland's remote Crocodile Island. Suspecting trouble, Tim's infinitely smarter sixteen year old brother, Nick, tags along for the weekend.

Herbert/ 'Tim's former classmates have mostly gone on to better themselves. Eric Draper, the head boy, is a lawyer: Libby Goldman, bubbly to the point of hysteria, is a children's TV presenter with her own show, Libby's Lounge which young Nick has made a point of avoiding: Brenda Blake - on the largish size - is now an Opera singer, and Mark Tyler an Olympic Athlete. Janet Rhodes, as condescending in her way as Draper, is a hairdresser. Sylvie Binns glumly volunteers her profession as a "housewife."

The party arrive at the Castle to be greeted by the sight of their host's corpse lying hacked to pieces and before the night is out, Sylvie Binns (poisoned) and Janet Rhodes (stabbed in her sleep with a model of the Eiffel Tower) have joined the Laird in the afterlife. Marooned on the island and with all the telephone wires cut, the survivors can only count down the hours until jolly Captain Horatio Randle returns in The Silver Medal to ferry them back to the mainland. In the meantime, whoever is responsible for the murders isn't likely to stop any time soon.

But who might this person be? Nick impulsively suspects the fellow guests, but as each meet with increasingly bizarre and grisly deaths, he wonders at the photograph in the late Rory McDougal's study. Why was only one of the former pupils in the snapshot, popular Jimmy Nadler, the brilliant inventor, not invited along to the reunion?

OK, as rip-offs of Agatha Christie go, it was never very likely that I Know What You Did Last Wednesday would out-gore Michael Slade's gloriously insane Ripper, and i so much prefer the Horowitz Horror's it isn't even close. And yet ... somehow i found the head on collision between creative deaths and routinely awful jokes so engaging that it was with some disappointment i turned over a page to find there were only three to go.