A Fortean Horror Sampler
A plague of batmen descend in Romeo Poole's
The Death Crescents Of Koti (Christine Campbell Thomson (ed.)
More Not At Night, Arrow 1963)
The more you think about it, the more you realise (plucks random figures from 'brain') at least 47% of horror fiction and 99% of supernatural lit. and SF qualifies as 'Fortean', rendering this entire exercise beyond the merely pointless. F**k it. Let me entertain me. It's not like you have to read it.
Leslie Charteris - The Inconvenient Monster. Simon Templar nearly comes face to scaly face with the Loch Ness monster. The villain of the piece is less fortunate.
H. R. Wakefield - The Cairn: Welland and Seabright ignore the warnings of locals who won't climb above Dim Wood when it's snowing, and encounter a Yeti for their foolhardiness. The Abominable Snowman is far from friendly and hurls them to their doom.
Ambrose Bierce - The Damned Thing: An invisible entity persecutes a rural community, designs fancy crop circles in spare time.
Karl E Wagner - Sticks: Shades of
The Blair Witch Project, inspired by real life experience of
Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye.
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Horror Of The Heights: Gallant aviator Joyce-Armstrong believes that the "mysterious" deaths of several pilots were caused by malevolent entities that haunt the skies 30,000 feet above Wiltshire. Taking to the air in his trusty monoplane, he seeks out the beauty and horror of the heights! Fortunately for us, Joyce-Armstrong belongs to that commendable breed who keep scribbling away in their journal right up to the moment of doom. His final entry is priceless.
E. R. Punshon - The Living Stone: “What could any man do against fifty tons of granite made animate?” Good question, especially when it flings itself upon you with a great leap and gluts on your blood. The professor, researching human sacrifice in Cornwall, stakes out the ‘hunting stone’ in Missing Lane following a series of mysterious disappearances in the locality.
Arthur Machen - The Shining Pyramid : The fairy folk are real and they loathe mankind.
Anna Taborska -Fish: Housebreakers torture a hapless postman by shoving his head in the aquarium housing his pet scorpion fish. It panics.
Romeo Poole - The Death Crescents Of Koti : South Pacific. Polynesians destroy a spindling race who live under a volcano on the island of Koti. Generations later, the menfolk of the Savaloos people are systematically picked off by "a devil in a long flying coat" which leaves three crescent-shaped indentations on its victims who seldom survive the night. White men to the rescue yet again. This time it's Dr. Seego and his three companions who come up with a serum before nipping off to the caves for a scrap with the human bats.
Manly Wade Wellman - Parthenope: When his fishing boat perishes on the rocks, young George Colby is dragged ashore by a woman so beautiful she might have stepped from the pages of Greek mythology ....
Oscar Cook - Si Urag Of The Tale: Borneo. After a party of his men are massacred while investigating a spate of mysterious disappearances, District Officer Dennis leads a party upstream to investigate. Eventually they capture the culprit, a tragic, hairy figure who worships a huge, man-eating plant (he has a picture of it tattooed across his chest). Even as he's telling them his sob-story, Si Urag is scheming how best to lure them to the sacred flower ..
Erckmann-Chatrian - The Spider Of Guyana. The hot springs at Spinbronn are popular with gout sufferers until one day they flood. A heap of animal skeletons are washed out of a nearby cave, and with them, that of a little girl who died five years earlier. What can be responsible? All is revealed when Sir Thomas Haverchurch decides to take a swift skinny dip ...
Bassett Morgan- Laocoon: Professor Denham, noted back home for his brain transplants on rats and an unshakable belief that sea-monsters exist, invites Willoughby out to Papau to assist in his research. From the moment the boat docks, Willoughby realises something is up: the houseboy, Wi Wo, is clearly terrified, and he can't find hide or hair of Cheung Ching, Denham's devoted assistant.It transpires that, having contracted leprosy, Cheung Ching begged the professor to insert his brain into that of the giant sea-serpent so he may continue with the research. Denham reluctantly performed the operation ...
W. Fenimore (A. Merrit ?) - Pool Of The Stone God: When the Moranus hits a reef 500 miles NE of Guinea, Professor Marston and four colleagues escape in a lifeboat and are washed up on an island. They chance upon a huge stone statue of a bat-winged God, as revolting to the touch as it is the eye. When night falls, the wings unfold and the creature attacks! Marston fortuitously evades the Stone God and hides in an abandoned hut until dawn. When he awakens, he realised he must have had a horrible dream, and his friends are probably safe and sound asleep elsewhere. But .....
Gerald W. Page - The Tree: Struck by a meteorite, the tree becomes a form of energy vampire, draining its victims whose deaths are officially recorded as heart failures. When the locals pour gasoline over it and burn it to a stump, the alien entity moves underground and heads toward town and richer pickings.
Rosalie Muspratt - Helvellyn: Elivion Or Hill Of Baal: Campbell Martin meets a stranger in black on the way to Grisedale tarn. The man, Jones, warns him that it is not safe to be on the mountainside after dark as the Druid's used to carry out human sacrifices here and the place has a bad reputation.
Paul Ernst - The Microscopic Giants: Copper miners excavating a shaft thirty thousand feet below Lake Superior during the Great War are attacked by unstoppable, eighteen inch mannikin's who can walk through solid concrete!
H. G. Wells - The Sea Raiders: The mystery behind a spate of unexplained boating and bathing deaths off the Devon coastline is revealed in all its horror when two boats comes under attack from a shoal of 'Haploteuthis ferox', giant squid who've developed a taste for human flesh. Only three of the fourteen eyewitnesses live to tell the tale.
See also
Subterranean CannibalsPlants hate YouCarry On Up The Jungle
