Ultimate Claustrophobia!

[dem bones]

Some rotter's been giving me grief and generally getting on my nerves for ages now and ... well, I've decided to wall him up alive forever and see how he fancies that! So, I'm looking for tips. Obviously, the first place one turns for inspiration in such delicate matters is pervy Mr. Poe but being a conscientious person I thought it best to consult as many authorities on the subject as possible - that usually makes for the best results. So while I'm slipping into my fetching skull & crossbones boiler-suit, would anybody care to suggest some additions to this celebration of slow-suffocation fun?

I thought not.

J. A. Barry - The Red Warder Of The Reef: Escaped convict thinks it's a smart idea to hide inside a huge iron buoy that's going to be launched the following day.

Michael Avallone - The Man Who Thought He Was Poe: Man's girly fixation with trying to be Roderick Usher drives wife to distraction.

Andrew Benedict - The Wall-To-Wall Grave: A modern day Fortunato chained to a radiator in a high-rise block. His captor hasn't checked on his progress and its been weeks.

Charles Birkin - The Godmothers: Old boy finds his passion late in life: walling up schoolgirls.

William Mudford - The Iron Shroud: Ghoulish Gothic classic sees Vivenzio - "the noble and the generous, the fearless in battle, the pride of Naples in her sunny hours of peace" - captured by Tolfi (a heartless bastard) and slowly done to death in a collapsing prison of fiendish design.

Richard Matheson - The Children Of Noah: Religious nut-jobs waylay a hapless motorist and lock him up in their customised jail house. A controversial selection perhaps as at least the hapless victim won't be hanging around for weeks waiting to die, but having said that I wouldn't wanna swap places.

Honore de Balzac - The Mysterious Mansion: Now let me get this straight. You're sure you haven't got a man hidden away in that Priest's hole?

John Wyndham - The Cathedral Crypt: Vow-breaking Nun joins the massed ranks of the sealed-up Sisters! There are so many like her it qualifies as a sub-genre in itself.

Seabury Quinn - The Curse Of The House Of Phipps: A Puritan hypocrite and his henchmen force a French slave into a hole and seal it with a heavy hearth-stone which is one seriously ungrateful gesture toward the woman who's just given you a son!

[Calenture]

How about Clive Barker's Dread (in Books of Blood vol II)?

At university Stephen Grace meets Quaid, who has an obsession with fear - with dread. He believes that a knowledge of dread is 'pre-personality,' known even by the fetus. Cheryll Fromm, an attractive, popular student, ridicules Quaid's ideas and becomes the subject of a bizarre experiment designed to push her beyond the borders of her own personal dread. He locks her in a stuffy upstairs room with only meat to eat (she is vegetarian), then waits for the cracks to show, taking photos when they do.

And Quaid is not satisfied with one experiment...

I remember that you wrote this one up in more detail, but I'm afraid I couldn't find it.

Ray Bradbury's The Screaming Woman is about a kid who hears screams coming from under the ground. I know it was filmed ages back. It's in S is For Space.

Another Bradbury story is The Cistern. Anna spooks out her sister Julia by making up a story about a man and a woman in a cistern below the streets. The man has been dead a long time, but the woman is only recently dead,

"But she is dead. Beautifully, beautifully dead. It takes death to make a woman really beautiful, and it takes death by drowning to make her most beautiful of all. Then all the stiffness is taken out of her, and her hair hangs up on the water like a drift of smoke."

At the end, there is the suggestion that the man in the cistern is Anna's lover Frank, and she wants to join him.

Isn't Henry Kuttner's The Graveyard Rats quite claustrophobic?

[dem bones]

It certainly is, but I'm thinking of walling someone up alive, not having them voluntarily crawl down tunnels via a rat- gnawed, rotten coffin.

Dread: I've no way of knowing if Barker has read it, but his story always struck me as a fleshed out, psycho'd up rewrite of Erckmann-Chatrian's Victorian classic The Three Souls.

Franklin suggested a Pan Horror classic.

A. G. J. Rough - Something In The Cellar: Charlie catches wife Stella in bed with his business partner shortly before he's due to travel to Austria for a seminar. Mindful of his wife's nymphomania - he chains her to a pole in the cellar and then walls her in with provisions for a month. Well, he'll only be away for three weeks. Unless he's involved in a fatal car crash and spends most of the year in a coma. Finally, he's recovered sufficiently to return home to England, but what will he find down there?

From the same series, more incarcerated nun fun in William Sansom's The Little Room.