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Post by dem bones on Oct 11, 2012 19:24:18 GMT
Charles Black (ed.) - Ninth Black Book Of Horror (Mortbury Press, Sept. 2012) Paul Mudie John Llewellyn Probert - The Anatomy Lesson Craig Herbertson - The Mall Simon Bestwick - Salvaje Gary Fry -Pet David Williamson - Ashes To Ashes Anna Taborska - The Apprentice Sam Dawson - Life Expectancy Paul Finch - What's Behind You? Gary Power - Ben’s Best Friend Thana Niveau - The Things That Aren't There Tom Johnstone - Bit On The Side Marion Pitman - Indecent Behaviour Kate Farrell - His Family John Forth - A Song, A Silence Marc Lyth - The Man Who Hated Waste David A. Riley - Swan SongDedicated to Christine Campbell Thomson which bodes well. The back cover promises 16 tales of "GORE ... GRUE .... STALKERS .... and SADISTS," and those who survive the opening ten pages will likely agree that Charles ain't overstating the case. John Llewellyn Probert - The Anatomy Lesson: A terrified girl in her early twenties is slowly dissected alive before an avid audience of ghoulish bastards. After the performance, the man known to his adoring public as 'The Demonstrator', receives an unwelcome visitor to his dressing room. The gatecrasher, a fellow performer - he's an accomplished stage magician - brings news of Emma, the celebrity sadist's beloved daughter .... Shades of Pan Book of Horror legend 'Nasty' Norman Kauffman (with, perhaps, a dash of Seabury Quinn during a misogynist moment). An unashamedly horrible opener to reassure us that we've come to the right place. Not for softies. Marion Pitman - Indecent Behaviour: Vicious thug Jason and dimwit pal Lenny target an old man outside the local gay bar and kick him to death. Thereafter, Jason is haunted by a phantom disembodied hand stroking his privates whenever he sees another man's arse. God knows, his poor battered Sharon has put up with plenty from her spouse down the years but you have to draw the line somewhere ... Anna Taborska - The Apprentice: Thanks to the efforts of his mother, violent psychopath Ralph has an unlikely talent for baking. Shortly after his arrival in the village, the local bread-maker is brutally murdered, paving the way for Ralph to set up what is soon a thriving business. Now all we wants is an apprentice, someone he can play God to and use as his personal punch-bag when the mood, as so often, takes him. Providence sees to it that a scrawny mute kid, a 'will work for food and lodgings' placard hung around his neck, is delivered to Ralph's door ... David Williamson - Ashes to Ashes: Steve Clark wakes to the most extreme case of eczema in dermatological history. Wife Ann is so appalled at her poor husband's condition, she doesn't stop to consider the obvious question: What if it's contagious?
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Post by dem bones on Oct 12, 2012 22:56:35 GMT
Gads, the Black Book has gone all subtle on us! Three quiet offerings, and not a drop of blood spilled between them. What's Behind You? is deserving of the Peter Haining Mammoth Book Of Haunted Houses treatment.
Sam Dawson - Life Expectancy: Judy's first thought on moving into a flat with fellow students Cress and Toni is to explore the attic for forgotten treasure. Her persistence is rewarded when she emerges from the cobwebs clutching a telephone apparatus dating from the late Victorian/ Edwardian period. Seems the Master and Mistress of the house had it installed so they could summon the servants day and night. It must have been awful for those poor women, Judy reckons. Never a moment to themselves, always at the beck and call of some over-indulged, rich tosser. Judy knows how they must have felt as, when she's not skivvying for her flatmates, she's resident dogsbody at the local Pizza Parlour.
Judy polishes her telephone until it's spic and span, then chooses the spot that will show it to best advantage, and .....
Thana Niveau - The Things That Aren't There: Mrs. Pearce talks child-detesting Emma, 12, into babysitting little Chloe yet again. No matter how horrible Emma behaves toward the whiny brat, Chloe, six, adores her. It will just be for a few hours, Mrs. Pearce assures her, but Chloe knows better. Her mum's out gallivanting with a guy and her track record suggests she'll not return return until morning. Bad enough that Emma has been lied to by an adult, but now Chloe's obsessing over nebulous "things" that wait in the shadow beneath the stairs ...
Paul Finch - What's Behind You?: Gower Peninsula, West Wales, 1960. The great painter Sir James Ravenstock takes a seven-strong party of Wigan art students on a field trip to Rhossilli village. He's insistent that, before they return home, they visit the local rectory, which is reputedly haunted by a particularly malevolent spectre. Sir James instructs them that, whatever they hear, on no account must they look back. Our narrator, Roy Pendleton, draws the short straw and reluctantly goes first, almost coming to grief when a crumpled blanket seems to stir in a bath chair and a taunting voice urges him to look behind you. Sir James, who, it transpires, has a rather shapely skeleton in his wardrobe, ignores his own advice and stares the menace full in the face ...
Also notable for the 9th Black Book's most admirable minor character to date, young Gibbon of the basin haircut, who picks up a copy of the recently published Pan Book Of Horror Stories at the station bookstall to see him through the weekend.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 13, 2012 19:51:54 GMT
Subtlty seems to have been and gone, leaving three splendid chillers to mark its passing, now we move back toward extreme noise terror (© Extreme Noise Terror) with this next, a macabre ghost story. Tom Johnstone - Bit On The Side: When Claire complains of a vile stench in the house, Nick suspects a dead mouse, but his shifting aside of furniture fails to locate the source. It's only when daughter Maisie, four, tells him there's a lady in the garden has promised to show her a baby, that he thinks back to Verity, his guilty Facebook secret. But how can that be when, after their final blazing row, he buried her in the woods with his own hands? Craig Herbertson - The Mall: Christmas Eve - the day specifically designed by Western society to remind its misfits and failures that they are surplus to requirements and, therefore, excluded from the glorious festivities of respectable, big-spending consumers. Where better to wallow in misery than the local shopping mall on a fools errand to collect the kids' present from some phoney New Age shop? James Bailey is one such lost soul, unemployed, trapped in a loveless marriage to Deirdre who, he suspects, will demand a divorce once the holiday is done. It wasn't always this way. Things went downhill fast when his reunion with the dole queue coincided with Dierdre throwing in her lot in with the local Coven, or, as James sees it, a bunch of pretentious, middle class plastic Wiccans playing at White Magic. The unseeing, bag-laden hordes; the relentless muzak; a festering tramp, half past dead by the look and smell of him. All serve to reinforces James's growing belief that George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead was a documentary, but what's this? "As he moved toward the toyshop he stopped in amazement.
Beyond the massage chairs in a solitary corner was a bookshop, not a multinational concern or a chain store but a real second-hand bookshop. He advanced toward it, at every moment thinking it might disappear. What the hell was it doing in this atrocity of a place?"The proprietor has hung a 'back in ten minutes' notice on the door, but a browse through the window sets Bailey to salivating over a row of NEL, FourSquare and Fontana titles before he spots the 20p bargain bin. There, lurking atop the pile, a signed first edition of L. A. Lewis's Tales Of The Grotesque! If you just broke into a sweat, don't worry. It's nothing to the full-blown nervo you'll experience ten pages later when the story takes a turn for the Robert Aickman's (or so it seems to me). Underestimate the powers of pretentious, middle class plastic Wiccans at your peril.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 15, 2012 17:45:14 GMT
.... lycanthrope: psychological torture: people shouldn't play with dead things or make them that way to begin with ....
Gary Fry - Pet : Edgar takes a new job with the D.S.S. If he's not to blow entire salary on the commute from his seaside home, there's nothing for it but to move back in with his cloying mother and godforsaken family dog during the week. Mother, obscenely delighted to see him, is as clingy and manipulative as ever, maybe more so now she's hounded Dad to his grave. Still dabbling in childish Black Magic nonsense, too. Much as he doesn't want to admit it to himself, 'Eddie' despises her guts. Maybe it's the return to depressing surroundings, maybe its the developing drink problem, but he's begun to imagine another presence around the house .....
Simon Bestwick - Salvaje: a gang of mercenaries, led by the particularly brutal Blackthorn, terrorise heavily pregnant Luisa and her pacifist husband, Jim. During the Spanish Civil War, Luisa's grandfather stole a rare artefact, a wolf's head carved from some unidentified metal, and Blackthorn has been hired to retrieve it. Luisa leads them to the scrub-land where Grandpa buried the piece, knowing that she will be murdered when the men have what they came for. But, unlike Blackthorn, she also knows the devastating power of the wolf's head - and how to unleash it.
Kate Farrell - His Family : Damien Roth, 32, a clean-cut porter and model employee according to his superiors. Damien furnishes a bolt-hole on the disused top floor of the old hospital building. It's very homely, what with a TV and everything. All that's missing is .... his family.
Told from the POV of the police officer unfortunate enough to walk in on Mum, Dad, elder brother and Damien enjoying a nice cup of tea.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 17, 2012 5:05:05 GMT
Two bite size chunks, the second reminiscent of something you'd find in The Pan Book Of Horror Stories circa vol 12 .....
Gary Power - Ben’s Best Friend: As he cycles home from new pal Andy's house on the Bay estate each night, Ben likes to frighten himself by imagining he's fleeing zombie flesh-eaters. If he can't make it to the Fairway before the last street lamp switches off ....
Marc Lyth - The Man Who Hated Waste: Stevie Walsh knocks down a pedestrian as he drives home from yet another visit to the recycling plant. It's not Stevie's fault if a man won't look where he's going and besides, all that lovely raw material to redistribute ....
.... and a pair of powerful supernatural horrors to close on.
John Forth - A Song, A Silence: A siren lures motorists to their doom on a traffic roundabout. Harris, narrowly escaping the ancient chanteuse's clutches after his car collides with a tree, is taken under the roof of Billy Bean, a stringy-haired hippie type. Billy, it transpires, keeps the traffic island under 24 hour video surveillance and has the most disturbing photo album to show for it. Mr. Forth's first appearance in the series and if he has any more like this in his locker it shouldn't be the last.
David A. Riley - Swan Song: "Nights In White Satin. Overrated, degenerate trash, just right for a pair of ancient hippies high on drugs." Three elderly Right Wing thugs - retired schoolteacher Bennett and his pals, Pinky Pinkerton, chairman of the Conservative club, and self-made businessmen, Sam Nedwell - make it their business to rid the local park of a pair of decrepit tramps. Bennett and cronies pack their baseball bats, confident this last hurrah will prove the most one-sided confrontation of their brutal campaign versus "undesirables." But the Huntingtons are not the pushovers they seem. Filthy rich ancient hippie philanthropists, Cider Man & Wino woman own a villa on the exclusive Maple Road. Back in the day they ran a refuge for the homeless until it closed amidst rumours of Black Magic and mysterious disappearances ....
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 12, 2012 9:38:14 GMT
I've reviewed The Ninth on www.heavenmakers.com/?p=729 but here it is - thought over all it was excellent and pretty hard hitting horror. Well, it’s horror on horror here with no punches spared and several right on the jaw. The Ninth Black Book edited by Charles Black is not for the squeamish. It begins with John Llewellyn Probert’s The Anatomy Lesson and I almost wish it didn’t. The author is at his most sickeningly nasty when he deals with medical subjects and this story of a twisted anatomist meeting another ‘entertainer’ is only marred by the impossibility of identifying with the main protagonist when the denouement arrives – which is in itself a testament to just what a damned good horror writer John Llewellyn Probert is. The Mall takes a step into the commercialized Hell of Christmas while Gary Fry’s Pet deals with a rather incestuous family and their…pet. Simon Bestwick’s Salvaje is a well constructed story of the facisistic franquistas picking on the wrong girl. David Williamson, veteran of Pan Horror come out with a good tale of a man falling to bits in Ashes To Ashes and demonstrates that the later Pan Horror authors definitely still have the mojo. Anna Taborska in The Apprentice gives us an accomplished effort with a man who is clever at making bread and dishing out unwarranted violence. A short story I particularly liked is Sam Dawson’s Life Expectancy, which has an old phone bringing a bleak message to a poor lady. As one might expect Paul Finch’s What's Behind You? is a definite highlight. What I like about Finch is that he often tries to stretch the boundaries of the form and, in this case, one is vaguely lulled into a pattern before a moment of real psychological horror creeps up on you, after which, the denouement shocks again with its unexpectedness. Would make a very good short film. Gary Power’s Ben’s Best Friend provides a warning leaflet about picking your friends carefully, a good story of external terror but for me Thana Niveau’s The Things That Aren't There is a standout piece of brilliant childhood horror that really captures the essence of inner terror reminiscent of the kind of fear that Ray Bradbury so eloquently unveiled in his early work. Tom Johnstone’s Bit On The Side and John Forth’s A Song, A Silence are enjoyable, creative and well told but as with Marion Pitman’s Indecent Behaviour seem to lack a little credibility – although in the latter, being haunted by a hand was rather neat. His Family by Kate Farrell provided a sickly disquieting image of hospital life but I felt the ending was almost unnecessary. Marc Lyth’s The Man Who Hated Waste is short and humorous. Finally, the veteran, David A. Riley, provides us with Swan Song, another highlight of this edition. Riley’s work has the bleakness of P.K. Dick and he is the master of the almost Ballardian antihero. No holds barred here in a grim unrelenting tale of three old nasties about to have a last evil fling – with unexpected and awful consequences.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 12, 2012 10:24:17 GMT
Absolutely loved that, Craig, and I believe it's the Black Magus of Mortbury's birthday today, too, so very best wishes to you, Dr. Terror! I'd been wondering if and when we'd ever get a proper review of Ninth Black Book - used to be the threads went on for pages and pages. I guess the lunacy surrounding FantasyCon has much to do with it: the sheer volume of novels, collections, anthologies and magazine's (anyone seen the relaunched Fear?) published to coincide with the event means we'll be playing catch-up way past September 13 when the next splurge hits the fan. It kind of makes me and my piggy bank nostalgic for the early days of this board when we could safely ignore 99% of the product. Who knows. Could be that works from certain Black Book legends could be appearing on a Vault Advent Calendar near you in the not-very-distant-at-all ....
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 12, 2012 10:33:18 GMT
Absolutely loved that, Craig, and I believe it's the Black Magus of Mortbury's birthday today, too, so very best wishes to you, Dr. Terror! I'd been wondering if and when we'd ever get a proper review of Ninth Black Book - used to be the threads went on for pages and pages. I guess the lunacy surrounding FantasyCon has much to do with it: the sheer volume of novels, collections, anthologies and magazine's (anyone seen the relaunched Fear?) published to coincide with the event means we'll be playing catch-up way past September 13 when the next splurge hits the fan. It kind of makes me and my piggy bank nostalgic for the early days of this board when we could safely ignore 99% of the product. Who knows. Could be that works from certain Black Book legends could be appearing on a Vault Advent Calendar near you in the not-very-distant-at-all .... It was particularly gratifying to see several regular vaultees on top form, Dem - Not to decry the rest but David A. Riley, Lord Probert and Paul Finch were exceptionally chilling and Thana Niveau's babysitting nightmare firmly crushes the idea that females can't write horror - possibly my favorite story because of its insights into childhood but it would be a difficult one to call as always. Well done Charles.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Dec 12, 2012 14:04:27 GMT
And happy birthday fiend of terror
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Post by David A. Riley on Dec 12, 2012 14:37:29 GMT
Happy Birthday, Charles!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Thana Niveau
Devils Coach Horse
We who walk here walk alone.
Posts: 109
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Post by Thana Niveau on Dec 12, 2012 16:55:12 GMT
Wishing you a black and evil day, Charlie! ;D
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Post by Johnlprobert on Dec 12, 2012 16:56:40 GMT
Seriously nasty wishes to a man who loves proper horror - Happy Birthday, Charlie!
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Post by andydecker on Dec 12, 2012 18:31:52 GMT
Happy birthday, Charles!
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Post by Dr Terror on Dec 13, 2012 12:16:49 GMT
Thanks Dem, Craig, David, Thana, John, Andy.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Dec 13, 2012 12:51:51 GMT
Many Happy Returns, Chas. Search & Destroy.
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