Kurt Singer - I Can't Sleep At Night

[jamesdoig]

Nov 22, 2014 10:14:08 GMT dem said:

The story about "a man who insensitively dashes a kitten’s brains out–then stupidly sits in an antique torture chair that succinctly removes ones eyes from their sockets" is most likely Bram Stoker's The Squaw, but as to one about the nuns ...?

Monster Festival (1965) has both The Thing in The Cellar and The Squaw. Or if it has 'macabre' in the title it could be Masters of the Macabre (1975) ed by Manley and Lewis, but that doesn't have The Thing in the Cellar.

[dem]

Nov 22, 2014 22:58:42 GMT jamesdoig said:

Nov 22, 2014 10:14:08 GMT dem said:

The story about "a man who insensitively dashes a kitten’s brains out–then stupidly sits in an antique torture chair that succinctly removes ones eyes from their sockets" is most likely Bram Stoker's The Squaw, but as to one about the nuns ...?

Monster Festival (1965) has both The Thing in The Cellar and The Squaw. Or if it has 'macabre' in the title it could be Masters of the Macabre (1975) ed by Manley and Lewis, but that doesn't have The Thing in the Cellar.

Our friend has since written back and -

Thanks so much! You know, shortly after posting my request, I found a book called "Monster Festival: Classic Tales of the Macabre" (ed. Eric Protter) that is a Random House children's division publication--and it has "The Thing in the Cellar" in it. I believe that may be the one--the cover seemed familiar. Edward Gorey illustrated, no less! Sometimes, I guess it just takes asking the right question...thanks for your help! Wonderful site.

Well done, James. I guess the "nuns being hammered paper-thin by demons for three nights in a row" were a red herring?

[jamesdoig]

Nov 23, 2014 7:34:38 GMT dem said:

Well done, James. I guess the "nuns being hammered paper-thin by demons for three nights in a row" were a red herring?

Here's the contents of Monster Festival - can't recall that any has nuns getting hammered thin by demons for three days (though it's a nice Freudian concept).

Brenda - Margaret St. Clair
13 at Table - Lord Dunsany ·
The Judge’s House - Bram Stoker
Podolo - L. P. Hartley
The Squaw - Bram Stoker
Revelations in Black - Carl Jacobi
Moonlight Sonata - Alexander Woollcott
The Thing in the Cellar - David H. Keller, M.D. ·
Impulse - Eric Frank Russell ·
The Novel of the White Powder - Arthur Machen ·
The Refugee - Jane Rice ·
The Lost Room - Fitz-James O’Brien ·
The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe

[billdemo2]

Mary Danby's 65 Great Spine Chillers also has The Thing in the Cellar and The Squaw... Could that be it?

I really would like to know the name of the story about the nuns being pounded flat by demons...

[dem]

Two from The Day of the Dragon.

Vincent Napoli

Arthur J. Burks - Black Harvest of Moraine: (Weird Tales, Jan 1950). When the ice-age retreated, who could know the force it left behind to plague and outwit men of the scientific age? Waterville, Central Washington. An attempt at crop salvage from a smutted wheat field provokes attack from a sentient mass of man-eating soot spores. Among the first casualties, fourteen year old Lonnie Keel is diced between the blades of a combine harvester and spat out in meaty chunks. All seems lost until, acting on the advice of fifteen-year-old Cappy Payne ("Cocky kid! Probably write poetry when he grows up, like his utterly useless old man!"), the army deep freeze the afflicted area because the spores don't like the cold up 'em.

Frank Gruber - The Thirteenth Floor: (Weird Tales, Jan 1949). A very special floor, the thirteenth, like all of its infamous ilk! Prior to imminent expedition to the Belgian Congo, Dick Javelin visits a top Chicago department store ("If the Bonanza hasn't got it, it isn't") to purchase a distilling kit. He's directed to the thirteenth floor where comely assistant Miss Carmichael sees him all right and agrees to meet him for a drink after work. Dick hangs around outside at closing time, but his date doesn't show. Furious, he returns to the Bonanza the following day, where he learns the thirteenth floor was retired sixteen years ago after three staff members were killed in a lift accident. Pity for Dick, he doesn't take the manager's word for it.

Vincent Napoli

[dem]

Julian S. Krupa

Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr. - The Invisible Invasion: ( Amazing Stories, April 1939). London was being destroyed from within, and somehow the solution lay in a carved meerschaum pipe.

Plucky Steve Ingram and his fiancee, Mona Wicke, expose supposed defector, Dr. Conrad Stengel, as a Gestapo ghoul sworn to destroy decadent London in readiness for a German invasion. The streets of the capital are already clogged with rotting corpses, victims of a grey acid dust manufactured and discharged by the evil pipe-smoking imposter; the author even provides the formula. Can the youngsters foil his diabolical scheme before this "nation of shopkeepers" is crushed beneath the jackboot?

[dem]

From Ghosts and Ghouls:

Hannes Bok

Seabury Quinn - Birthmark: (Weird Tales, Sept. 1941). A Strange, Dreadful Drama of Pre-Natal Influence ... Pat Carmicheal of the Army Medical corps relates the tragic case of Fedocia Watrous, Red Cross volunteer and were-gorilla. During the latter stages of pregnancy, Fedocia's mother was briefly abducted by an affectionate great ape. Consequently, Her daughter, when faced with danger, undergoes a horrible transformation — although this can occasionally prove beneficial to those around her, as when she snaps the neck of a German assassin aboard a train bound for Paris. Carmicheal hadn't cared for the fellow even before his purpose was revealed: "Where did he get off treating us like a lot of railway porters? Let him read his London Daily Mail and be damned to him! .... I settled back in my seat with a copy of the Bystander ..."

[dem]

The library came good again. They're on a roll.

Kurt Singer [ed] - They Are Possessed: Masterpieces of Exorcism (W. H. Allen, 1976)

Photo: Chris Yates

Reverend Carl Vogl - Exorcism in a Convent
Carroll F. Michener - Six Feet of Willow Green
Ann Taylor [Richard R. Smith] - The Curse of Hamid
Reverend Johannes Greber - Demons by the Dozen
Michael Ballantine - The Devil And Sharon Tate
Evangeline Walton - The End of the Corridor
Kurt & Jane Singer - The Exorcist — New York Style
Seabury Quinn - The Hand of Glory
Stephan A. Hoeller - The Original Black Mass
Pierre Janet - Satan and Dr. Janet
D. H. Lawrence - Glad Ghosts
Carl Jacobi - Portrait In Moonlight
R. S. Lambert - The Amherst Mystery

Blurb:
Possession by spirits is the theme of Kurt Singer's latest anthology of the supernatural. In it, using both fictional and real-life accounts, the author investigates strange phenomena that have existed throughout the ages, but which are only now being revealed to those outside a sheltered circle. With the story of the Manson murders and of the poltergeist called Popper, Mr Singer shows how possession is still a fact today. Represented in this collection are authors as diverse as D. H. Lawrence, Carroll F. Michener and Carl Jacobi.

Here are accounts of exorcism in a convent, of possession in a small German town, of Black Magic in the time of Louis XIV. Mystical happenings ? Disordered psyches? Whatever explanations there are, one thing is sure: They Are Possessed will intrigue sceptics and believers alike as they enter into the vividly demonic atmosphere of the other world.

Another lopsided Singer selection, approximately two thirds non-fiction/ 'non-fiction', plus a Lawrence short from The Dial and four reprints from Weird Tales.