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Post by noose on Feb 1, 2011 11:29:53 GMT
(N + G 2012)
Soon up from Noose and Gibbet will be as many horror stories as possible from that sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible author known as Anonymous from as many horror anthologies and magazines as possible. Any help on this one would be utterly brilliant - just the name of the story and where it came from on this thread, and I'll keep you posted!
Again it will be a hardback and again it will be £20 etc etc...
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Post by weirdmonger on Feb 1, 2011 13:42:17 GMT
(N + G 2012) Soon up from Noose and Gibbet will be as many horror stories as possible from that sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible author known as Anonymous from as many horror anthologies and magazines as possible. Any help on this one would be utterly brilliant - just the name of the story and where it came from on this thread, and I'll keep you posted! Again it will be a hardback and again it will be £20 etc etc... That sounds interesting. Are these stories that have always been anonymous and still are dotted around in various publications? As you probably know, Nemonymous had stories that started off in print as anonymous then late-labelled in the next issue. (Except two of them are still anonymous today). BTW, The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies will not have any anonymous stories, if anyone is wondering. des
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Post by noose on Feb 1, 2011 13:45:13 GMT
stories that have always been anonymous Des.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 1, 2011 13:48:02 GMT
some personal favourites. have resisted the temptation to go for anything too rubbishy but can oblige if needs be. The Monk Of Horror or, The Maniacs Fate (Peter Haining's Great British Tales Of Terror, J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Horror Stories) The Astrologer's Legacy or, the Maniac's Fate (ditto) The Mysterious Stranger (Montague Summers' Victorian Ghost Stories. Summers' anthologies include a number of anonymous contributions but this, famously credited as an influence on Bram Stoker, is maybe the 'best'. The Man On The Stairs is another gem, although it now seems generally accepted that this was the work of Summers himself. Peter Haining reputedly got up to similar capers. Also available in Michel Parry's Rivals Of Dracula, Aickman's 5th Fontana Ghost Stories & various. ) The Dead Man Of Varley Grange (Montague Summers' Victorian Ghost Stories, Fifty Masterpieces Of Mystery, Chetwynd-Hayes' 15th Fontana Ghost Stories & various) In The Slaughteryard (originally The Adventures of the Adventurers' Club: A Shocker in Six Shocks. By Five Men and a Woman, Etc, 1890. Reprinted in Michel Parry's Jack The Knife and Mary Danby's 15th Fontana Horror. The Adventures of the Adventurers' Club has recently been reissued in a British Library edition) A Tale Of A Gaslight Ghost (Chetwynd-Hayes' Gaslight Tales Of Terror & various) The Bloody Hand ( Lord Halifax Ghost Book) The Restless Dead ( Lord Halifax Ghost Book: originally Blackwoods, 1892. The Dead Bride (the Marjorie Bowen translation in Great Tales Of Horror) The Spectre Bride (David Blair's Wordsworth selection, Gothic Short Stories) Guyon of Marseilles (Alaric A. Watts' The Literary Review, 1825) Extracts from Gosschen's Diary: No. 1 (David Blair's Gothic Short Stories) The Murder Hole (originally Blackwoods, Feb, 1829, reprinted in Ronald Curran's The Legend Of Sawney Beane & various. In this instance, Anon's cover has been blown. Robert Morrison & Chris Baldick outed her as Catherine Sinclair in their Tales Of Terror From ‘Blackwood’s Magazine (OUP, 1996) Confessions Of A Deformed Lunatic (Peter Haining's The Penny DreadfulThe Grave Robbers (from the Christmas issue of The Garland, 1851. would never have heard of it were it not for Mr. Warren/ Woolrich exhuming it for his Amalgamated Brotherhood Of Spooks There are STACKS of 'em in the two weighty Ronald Curran Fawcett anthologies Witches, Wraiths & Warlocks and The Weird Gathering, but you'd require the patience of a Saint to wade through these seriously academic works to retrieve the better ones. It's a similar case with Peter Haining's wildly entertaining The Penny Dreadful and The Shilling Shockers which are a bit of a minefield as i'm sure many of the contributions aren't quite as 'anonymous' as the great man reckons. Depending on your final selections, that's the one potential headache as far as i can see. Your 'anonymous' may have already been unmasked!
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Feb 1, 2011 17:40:04 GMT
I suppose there was that fashionable period when amateur gentleman wrote loads of lurid stuff and wouldn't dream of announcing who they were - 'Peer of the realm in horror shocker' if the Sun had been around.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 1, 2011 22:44:51 GMT
i'm not sure if this was common practice, but there's this huge, undated volume of Cassells magazine where the authors seem to have adopted a collective responsibility policy. All the contributors are named on one of the title pages, but we're not told who wrote what. J. S. Le Fanu is prominent among the participants, but i'd hesitate to blame him for a story entitled The Body-Snatchers mainly because it reads nothing like him. Bet Peter Haining wouldn't have been so cautious!
some good ones ...
The Monster Of Scotland (Peter Haining's The Penny Dreadful). Exciting, bloody and probably bloody fanciful account of the life and crimes of the Sawney Beane clan. Haining claims to have found it in an issue of The Terrific Register though it's almost certainly ripped from Captain Charles Johnson's General History Of The Most Famous Highwaymen, etc (1734) Haunted (Richard Dalby's The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories, Robinson 1995) The Parricide Punished (the pick of the anonymous ones in Chris Baldick's The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Peter Haining used it in Great Tales Of Terror From Europe & America) An Old Manuscript (Ghosts & Scholars #16, 1993. Originally Cambridge Review, June 1911).
and ....
The undated Faber edition of Basil Davenport's otherwise commendable Tales To Be Told In The Dark wastes several pages on masterpiece of Victorian tedium, The Closed Cabinet then adds insult to injury by following it with his own allegedly reader friendly version, The Closed Cabinet Retold - like those who'd endured the former would fancy a second dose! The Faber edition of his Deals With The Devil include yet another Doctor Faustus and The Countess Kathleen O’Shea
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Secret (Charles G. Waugh, Martin H. Greenberg & Jenny-Lynn Azarian's Lighthouse Horrors). Don't have a copy, i just like horror stories set in lighthouses.
to the best of my knowledge, nobody was ever charged with Defecation, Sodomy, Intestines and Research (Or what Jack Started When He Stopped Ripping), from Peeping Tom #13 (1994)
In the very early days (late 'eighties) of the Vampyre Society when their magazine was simply known as Vampires, the short stories often went uncredited until the following issue, so if your sub ran out you'd be none the wiser. This may have been deliberate although as the artwork credits were often completely unhinged, we can't rule out plain old editorial oversight. We never did discover who wrote The Victim
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Post by jamesdoig on Feb 1, 2011 23:42:25 GMT
The Mysterious Stranger (Montague Summers' Victorian Ghost Stories. Summers' anthologies include a number of anonymous contributions but this, famously credited as an influence on Bram Stoker, is maybe the 'best'. This one's author is also known - Doug Anderson has an article on it in the latest Fastitocalon, a fantasy journal. Evidently Robert 18-B and Richard Dalby are publishing it under the author's name in Vintage Vampires , which I mentioned a while ago.
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Post by cw67q on Feb 2, 2011 8:16:46 GMT
Vaulters, you can safely ignore the post below as I was thinking of the Mysterious Lodger . I'm not deleting in case anyone already read the post and is confused by its vanishing - Chris The Mysterious Stranger (Montague Summers' Victorian Ghost Stories. Summers' anthologies include a number of anonymous contributions but this, famously credited as an influence on Bram Stoker, is maybe the 'best'. The Man On The Stairs is another gem, although it now seems generally accepted that this was the work of Summers himself. Peter Haining reputedly got up to similar capers. Also available in Michel Parry's Rivals Of Dracula, Aickman's 5th Fontana Ghost Stories & various. ) If this is the tale i'm thinking of (fairly lengthy, sinister lodger, child death, despair inducing religious conclusion) then it has been attributed to Le Fanu by Jim Rockhill. Jim R is a top Le Fanu man, and all round top guy, but for once he left me unconvinced. The type of religiosity exhibited in the conclusion didn't fit, in my mind, with anything else from Le Fanu's ghost story catalogue (I've only reda a few of the novels though). I put this to JIm and he made some good points about the time of writing, coinciding with Le Fanu in despair over his wife's death. I'm still not sure I'm 100% convinces though. It is a strong story, but I find the sentiments of the conclusion repellent and that perhpas makes me reluctant to accept that Le Fanu wrote it. hey we all have our biases - Chris
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Post by jamesdoig on Feb 2, 2011 20:33:06 GMT
It must be hard to ascribe authorship on the basis of the story alone, though some experts seems to be able to do it on the basis of words and phrases commonly used etc. This is the one that Bleiler thought wasn't by le Fanu, but he included it in Ghost Stories and Mysteries because others like MR James and SM Ellis thought it was by him. "The Mysterious Stranger" also has a MR James connection in that Monty thought it had influenced Dracula, and again others have followed him on that though there's no evidence Stoker read it. Peter Haining tried to find it, not realising it was the same story Summers had published years before, and came up with a totally different tale published in Chambers Journal!
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Post by dem bones on Feb 3, 2011 8:07:41 GMT
This one's author is also known - Doug Anderson has an article on it in the latest Fastitocalon, a fantasy journal. Evidently Robert 18-B and Richard Dalby are publishing it under the author's name in Vintage Vampires , which I mentioned a while ago. "The Mysterious Stranger" also has a MR James connection in that Monty thought it had influenced Dracula, and again others have followed him on that though there's no evidence Stoker read it. Peter Haining tried to find it, not realising it was the same story Summers had published years before, and came up with a totally different tale published in Chambers Journal! i can understand how MRJ arrived at his theory about The Mysterious Stranger because, even if Stoker never read it, there are similarities, but Peter Haining dragging anon's The Vampire Of Kring into the equation in his M. R. James Book Of The Supernatural is another matter! personally, i usually prefer it when anonymous stays that way, but i'll be looking out for the Dalby/ Eighteen-Bisang anthology purely to discover who they've nailed for The Mysterious Stranger. I hope it's one of those instances where we all turn to each other, shake are heads and ask "who ?" if i only knew where the bride has hidden her stash, the Misty annuals ran their fair share of anonymous spooky short stories along with educational articles like Make Your Own Shrunken Head although you can bet Egmont would want a fee for reprinting them. You could possibly derive an entire collection just by ransacking the Wordsworth editions. Between them, Rosemary Gray's Scottish Ghost Stories and Gripping Yarns account for eleven and a 'traditional'
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Post by jamesdoig on Feb 3, 2011 10:26:40 GMT
I hope it's one of those instances where we all turn to each other, shake are heads and ask "who ?" Yep, it's some German guy who's hardly been translated into English and who isn't even known in his own country.
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Post by noose on Feb 4, 2011 18:55:39 GMT
cheers Gents, into my little black booklet they go! I'm only going to do anon stories as far as 1970s - seemed like as good a decade as any to stop!
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Mar 26, 2012 23:25:24 GMT
Not much to add to the ones already listed above, but here are three:
The Story of Sidi Nonman (1963, Rod Serling's Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves)
The Ghost of Washington (1904, can be found in Marvin Kaye's Haunted America)
The Strange Guests (1837, likewise can be found in Kaye's Haunted America)
Looking back over them, I doubt that they're good fits. The aforementioned "The Lighthouse Keeper's Secret" may be a better prospect, however.
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Post by helrunar on Jan 19, 2022 17:29:57 GMT
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