seemed as good a time as any to revive this from
Vault Mk I.. (apologies if it's already on here but i couldn't find it).
Some notes on Mary Danby's contributions to the Fontana Horror books plus one. Rereading this lot recently confirmed my opinion that, quite apart from her talents as an editor, Danby is also a criminally under-rated horror author. I've a few more of her stories scattered about in young adult collections, notably
The Green Ghost & Others which I keep meaning to make a start on, so maybe I'll expand on this and prolong the torture.
Quid Pro Quo:
“Sarah stared at the mirror, and a bloated, moulting, deformed creature, half woman, half budgerigar, stared back …”The Potters are on holiday for a fortnight leaving the hired help, widow Sarah Smedley the run of the place bar their endless lists of do’s and don’ts. Their chief concern is that she feed Dicky the budgie, but when her lover Harry (married, three kids) asks her to spend four days with her at a Birmingham hotel she’s not going to let a little birdy stand in her way. (Horror 5)
Party Pieces: Maggie and George throw one of their famous New Years Eve parties, and they will insist on treating their unlovely guests to a divertissement. Last year it was the “ghost” in the spare bedroom (dry ice and a tape recorder), this time, something altogether more complex for “Tonight is the night when the Bogeyman dies”. What follows is a variation on A. N. L. Munby’s
A Christmas Game via Bradbury’s
The October Game with just enough Danby to give it a further ghastly twist. (Horror 6)
The Secret Ones: Adventures of three resilient rats - husband, wife and wife’s sister - who make home in the attic of a family mourning the death of their little daughter … (Horror 7)
Harvest Home: The inhabitants of Marna are the most beautiful, healthy and friendly race on earth. So what’s their dark and deadly secret? Much of it has to do with their drink of choice, Risoc. The rest … Tessa is about to discover the rest … (Horror 8 )
The Natterjack: Sprightly sixty-year-old Celia buys Marsh cottage. The late occupant, another old girl, was considered a bit strange locally, on account of her morbid fear of toads. Celia doesn’t pay any attention to this silly gossip … until the day she finds a pumpkin-sized natterjack eying her from the back doorstep. Upset and strangely terrified , she confides her fears to old Jack, the simpleton Gardener with the warty wrists …. (Horror 9)
Keeping In Touch: Alistair, recovering from a breakdown after his wife fled to Amsterdam with her lover, is invited to all the best Chelsea parties by friends keen to keep an eye on him. After one such gathering, he drives home drunk and knocks down a young man with an Afro. Seeing as the lad’s dead, there doesn’t seem much point in his hanging around just to get into trouble. At the next night’s gathering, he’s imposed upon to create a Frankenstein monster for a game of charades … (Horror 10)
Nursery Tea: Olivia and Hugh avenge themselves on the despotic nanny who ruined their childhood by putting the old girl through the punishments she once so readily inflicted on them. (Horror 11)
The Engelmayer Puppets: Doncaster. Gwendoline Porter-Grant lost her husband in the war and now all she has left of her family is a ghastly son, Sir William, an arrogant sixteen year old bully who will inherit the mausoleum of a house and the family fortune when he reaches twenty-one. His favourite threat is that he’ll cut her off without a penny.
At the Castle Fenton Annual Antique Fair, William acts his usual boorish self, upsetting traders and embarrassing his mother before they encounter Julius Von Bick who offers them an Austrian Puppet Theatre for the ludicrously tiny sum of one guinea. William buys it, thinking to sell it on at a massive profit. But not before he’s mauled the puppets around some and put on a show for his mother that she’ll never forget … (Horror 12)
Woodman’s Knot:
"Carneads: A nomadic European tribe which, in the belief that it could create a race of great physical strength weaned its children on the mother's flesh. Their way of life took on a Religious significance ,,," 17 year old shop worker Sandra Morrison meets Daniel Carne at a funfair and quickly falls in love with this tall, brooding hunk. Evidently he feels the same way about her as a marriage proposal is not slow in coming and he whisks her off to live on the family commune, Woodman's Knot. The massed ranks of his relatives are kindness itself, even if she finds some of their ways rather strange by her own standards. Then she falls pregnant .... (Horror 13)
The Witness: Whitesea. Sylvia, down on her luck, gives uncle Arthur a helping shove toward his coffin so that she can get her hands on his house and convert it into a respectable hotel. She hasn’t accounted for Julius, the old boy’s tenacious cat, who’s taken that whole “nine lives” thing to heart. (Horror 14)
Robbie: A well-meaning but mentally retarded eleven year old takes everything his long-suffering parents tell him way too literally. So when he wants to know what little boys are made of, it would be better not to rattle off “frogs and snails and puppy-dog’s tails.” And they certainly shouldn’t leave any sharp instruments within his reach …. (Horror 15)
Curlylocks: Rock House, Garthwaite. Nineteen year old Angela has realised that maybe it wasn’t such a shrewd move marrying Geoffrey after all. A wealthy solicitor, sixteen years her senior, Geoffrey won’t let her do a thing for herself and she’s doomed to a non-life of daytime TV with the occasional hour off for the joys of staring into space. When he refuses to allow her to cut her hair she rebels: isolated and resentful, she chances on a book about witchcraft in the local library and tries out some nasty anti-Geoffrey spells. Her dabbling in black sorcery is all too successful. (Horror 16)
True Love: Jack and Vera Sprat have been wed for forty years and never a cross word. Now retired, he prides himself on his hand-crafted model village in the back garden while Vera is content dusting her fabulous collection of trinkets. Meanwhile, people continue to go missing in the immediate area: two paperboys, the door to door salesman from Kwik-O-Kleen, that rather plump woman looking for her cat. Cannibalism is the secret to a happy marriage. (Horror 17)
Lady Sybil, or The Phantom Of Black Gables: Dorking. The domineering Lady Sybil’s husband drowned himself in two feet of water, unable to take any more of his unlovely wife. After his death, Sybil and her two sons live as recluses if you discount the servants. Geoffrey is a doctor and Edward a failed composer given to boozing away his crippling frustration.
Now in her seventieth year, of late Sybil has been haunted by a shadowy figure in a cape and top hat whose slimy footprints can clearly be discerned leading to the house from the river. Has her husband returned from the grave to exact supernatural revenge or is perhaps Edward, easily led by his brother, masquerading as the ghost in order to drive the old girl insane?
We end on a note of terror with one party confined to an Asylum. (Supernatural)
