Stuart David Schiff - Whispers III

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Marshall Arisman:

Stuart David Schiff - Preface

Dennis Etchison - The Dead Line
Ramsey Campbell - Heading Home
David Drake - King Crocodile
Hugh B. Cave - The Door Below
Phyllis Eisenstein - Point Of Departure
David Campton - First Born
Roger Zelazny - The Horses Of Lir
Frank Belknap Long - Woodland Burial
Karl E. Wagner - The River Of Night's Dreaming
Charles E. Fritch - Who Nose What Evil
Jean Darling - Comb My Hair, Please Comb My Hair
Steve Sneyd - A Fly One
Fritz Leiber - The Button Moulder
William F. Nolan - The Final Quest (verse)



Blurb:
Journey through the quiet but deadly world of Whispers...

Explore nature's strangest greenhouse, where crossbred terrors grow and kill.. Check into a frightfully bizarre hospital, where treatment begins with death. Spend a night in an eerie abandoned lighthouse, where the gateway to a watery hell unleashes its hungriest demons.

BUT BEWARE-YOU ARE HOLDING A ONE-WAY TICKET TO TERROR...

Little more than a stub for now, but I'm sure many of you will be familiar with at least some of the contents. Whispers was that rarest of series' - one that consistently delivers.

Includes:

David Campton - Firstborn: Harry and Elaine are rescued from their debt Hell by his wealthy uncle who invites them to live with him at his magnificent Dorset home. Uncle has a mania for exotic plants and it is clear from the first that the chief reason for his charity is the close proximity of Elaine, though not for the reason Harry suspects. Uncle’s proudest possession - even more-so than the bone-crushing, man-eating monstrosity in the greenhouse - is the multi-tendrilled, touchy-feely demon flower in the cellar whose perfume acts as a powerful aphrodisiac - it certainly solves the couple’s bedroom problems. But when it molests Elaine and she falls pregnant, the lovers face an anxious wait to discover what she will give birth to …

Jean Darling - Comb My Hair, Please Comb My Hair: In a setting not far removed from a fairy tale gingerbread house, surrounded by sinister woods, an ancient witch feeds off the lives of a mother and daughter who are compelled to pamper her. She grows younger and ever more voluptuous as they rapidly deteriorate into withered crones. A really good, disturbing horror tale, reminiscent in part of Philip K. Dick's famous The Cookie Lady.

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Frank Belknap Long - Woodland Burial: Will Gage offs his wife with arsenic so he can take up with sexy Molly Tanner. Mrs. G. takes doesn't care for the arrangement, leaves her grave to return and throttle the usurper in bed, making away with Molly's scarf as a trophy. A panicked Will sets out with his shovel to see that his missus is still where he buried her. A sore squirrel alerts the sheriff to the killer's behavior.

Steve Sneyd - A Fly one: Misanthropic cop Vrczynski interviews the hunchbacked killer of 14-year-old Elizabeth Joy Manvers, whose corpse was found discarded on waste ground. A curious factor is that the killer left no footprints in the muddy soil. Neither did his victim. Vrczynski has Quasimodo remove his coat.

Ramsey Campbell - Heading Home: A mad scientist is so engrossed in his pursuit of the elixir of life that he fails to notice his wife is having it away with the village butcher, a man very handy with a cleaver and not shy to use it. Ghoulish, and v. funny.

Phyllis Eisenstein - Point Of Departure: Leah receives a curt telephone dinner invitation from her mother - the same cancer casualty she buried thirteen years ago in Rosewood cemetery.

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Roger Zelazny - The Horses Of Lir: When his Uncle Stephen dies, Randy inherits his office as keeper of a Great Old One's golden chariot. His first duty is to harness a herd of Loch Ness monsters and carry Stephen's corpse to the Isles of the Blessed. #cryptozoology #lochnessmonster

Charles E. Fritch - Who Nose What Evil: An evil wizard imprisons a beautiful fairytale princess in Billy's nostril. How to release her that they can live happily ever after? #loveisinsanity

Denis Etchison - The Dead Line: Karen, a coma victim, is hooked to a life support machine for surgeons to harvest her every organ as the need arises. Her husband, our narrator, resolves to end her ordeal and dissuade others from donating the body of a loved one's body to science.

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Karl E. Wagner - The River of Night's Dreaming: "In a section like this, and dressed as she was, it was unlikely that anyone she might encounter would be of good Samaritan inclinations." A bus carrying inmates from the state psychiatric prison careers over a cliff. The lone (?) survivor, a young woman swims to a rat-infested waterfront where she's pursued through street and alley by a shadowy, deformed figure, eventually arriving at a Victorian pile amid a row of derelict tenements. Wary of discovery, the fugitive introduces herself to the kindly Mrs Castaigne and her comely, predatory lesbian maid, Camilla, as Cassilda Archer, the surname borrowed from the psychiatrist who straitjacketed her for shock treatment. Mrs Castaigne insists she sleep in the room that belonged to her daughter, Constance, who is "no longer with us." The hostess suggests Cassilda stay on as her well-paid live-in companion, to which she delightedly agrees. Her first duty is to recite to her hostess from the second act of a notorious proscribed book, rumoured to drive those who read it insane. Perhaps her saviours may not have her best interests at heart after all.

KEW's postumous #AcidGothic contribution to The King in Yellow.