Charles Birkin - Where Terror Stalked

[dem bones]

Charles Birkin - Where Terror Stalked (Tandem, 1966)

Where Terror Stalked
New Faces
Obsession
Shelter
The Orphanage
Paris Pilgrimage
The Belt
Softly ... Softly
Old Mrs. Strathers
The Harlem Horror
Gran
Bring Back My Bonny
No More For Mary.

To Ralph Stokes for no good reason

The Harlem Horror, Shelter, Paris Pilgrimage, The Belt Obsession and Old Mrs. Strathers are all reworkings/ extended versions of stories from the Creeps series.

Old Mrs. Strathers: Paralysed by a stroke, old Mrs. Strathers is powerless to intervene on her doting son's behalf when his faithless wife, Molly, sets about poisoning him. As Ronnie lies dying, with a supreme effort she raises herself from her chair, and ... pitches head-first into the fireplace ....

Paris Pilgrimage: A revamped, extended version of The Cockroach from Monsters. Thirty years on from the awful events, we catch up with Jane on her return to the scene of the crime.

New Faces: "You mean it's the bloke what was in the news tonight ... the fellah what could 'elp the police in connection with doin' in all those perverts?". Thomas Brown's murder spree has accounted for the death of eight homosexuals, but the net is closing and he's aware of being watched wherever he goes. To get away from one plain-clothes policeman, he slips into the waxworks and hides himself away in the Chamber of Horrors for the night.

The Harlem Horror: The Harwoods, Michael, Mary and little Clare, move from London to New York. There have been a spate of child disappearances in the Big Apple, and one day Clare goes missing. Some months later, the grieving, broken parents attend a funfair on Coney Island. During a sudden downpour they take shelter in a tent which turns out to be the entrance to a freak show. The star exhibit is the 'What-is-it?', a one-eyed, hideously deformed creature which the barker assures is female and aged no more than ten. On the boat home to England, Michael buys a newspaper. The lead story tells of a police raid on a laboratory in Harlem where the brilliant - albeit criminally insane - plastic surgeon, Sir John Trowbridge, has been performing abominable vivisections on children and animals which he then sells on to the freak shows ...

Obsession: Hartledean. Doris Carson and Henry Russell are to wed. Joe, the village idiot, has a massive crush on Doris as she's the only person who has ever been kind to him. After she gently declines his offer of marriage, Joe takes to stalking both she and her burly fiance. Henry beats him up.

Events reach their grim conclusion at the old quarry when, with a superhuman effort, Joe dislodges a huge boulder, intending for it to crush the life out of his rival. It takes a nasty deflection on the way down ..

Shelter: Brazil. Paul Christie spends the night at the home of Lopez, his wife and their daughter when they kindly give him refuge from a terrible storm. In the dark, he is visited in his room by one of the ladies of the house who shares his best. As he rides away next morning, he learns of the existence of a second daughter. He was lucky to catch her, actually, as she's being consigned to a leper coloney later on today.

No More For Mary: One of Birkin's rare and increasingly bizarre excursions into SF. Author Toby Lewis, holidaying in San Bernando, discovers a beautiful jewelled insect and decides it will do nicely for sister Mary who's something big in Lepidoptera at Oxford. The "bug" is actually Zeon, a visitor from a far more developed and benevolent society than our own who are intent on colonising Earth by peaceful means and saving us from ourselves. After the hapless Toby has left him exposed near an ants nest, Zeon suffers a cruel and agonising death while trying to free himself of his spacesuit.

In his introduction to Tales Of Terror From Outer Space (Fontana, 1975), R. Chetwynd-Hayes writes; "Charles Birkin has given us a new kind of invader from outer space in No More For Mary. I can only suggest you be very careful with the insecticide spray from now onwards. That over-sized bug crawling up the table leg might well have the kindest intentions."

[DemonSpawn]

That strap-line "Charles Birkin Infects One With Creeping Fears!" is just ace. I'd definitely buy this for that strap-line alone.

[dem bones]

.... and unlike most, it also has a semblance of truth to it. In Birkin's world the cosmic joker has one f**k**g twisted sense of humour.

For those of you who appreciate Birkin and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, you might like to drop Justin a line as i gather he's printed some extra copies of the new Paperback Fanatic (#22). Get in quick would be my advice.

thepaperbackfanaticATsky.com
(replace the AT with @, obviously)

meanwhile, i'm about to pay a visit to the The Orphanage and that nice Mrs. Pennyweather. How she dotes over her poor little charges! Who could spread nasty and, frankly, absurd rumours about her?

[johnnymains]

I'm *sure* that's Denis Gilmore (Blood on Satan's Claw) on the front cover. 

[Dr Terror]

From yesweekly.com/My-First-Fright-a18952/ :

What, I asked Neil, had really scared him when he was small?



“I was about 5 or 6, and it was a story by Charles Birkitt or something like that, about a couple whose son or daughter was stolen away some years before the story starts, who visit a freak show and see these beautiful, strange freaks, one of whom has golden eyes. Later they read a newspaper account about an evil doctor who has been stealing children and making them into freaks. There was something in that story that chilled my heart.”



A little investigation proved that this was “The Harlem Horror,” by Charles Birkin. Gaiman’s memory of the story was pretty accurate, although, when I tracked it down and sent it to him, it didn’t hold up as well for him as “The Monster of Dread End” does for me.



“The first thing that strikes me is the astonishingly bad writing. The second is that, in my memory the story started in Coney Island. And the third is how well I had remembered the key freak scene — the golden eye — with one exception: In my memory the freak girl had been intelligent, although dumb; in my memory she had recognized her parents, although they had not recognized her.”



“The Harlem Horror” was, of course, meant to be scary, and it worked, at least on Neil when he was a boy.