Richard Dalby - Horror For Christmas

[dem bones]

Richard Dalby (ed.) - Horror for Christmas (Michael O'Mara, 1992)

Foreword – Richard Dalby

W. W. Jacobs – Jerry Bundler
Sabine Baring-Gould – Mustapha
F. S. Smythe – The Sinister Inn
Hugh Walpole – Tarnhelm
Marjorie Bowen – The Crown Derby Plate
Nigel Kneale – The Stocking
F. McDermott – The Spider
Robert Aickman – The Visiting Star
Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes – Christmas Eve
Robert Bloch – The Night Before Christmas
Ron Weighell – The Greater Arcana
Basil Copper – Wish You Were Here
Stephen Gallagher – To Dance By the Light of the Moon

Another library loan. Was a little disappointed at the time that the selection didn't live up to the marvellous standards of Ghosts For Christmas and (my favourite) Chillers For Christmas. Which is not to say it lacks thrills!

[dem bones]

Graham Potts

Blurb:
Martha Pym said that she had never seen a ghost and that she would very much like to do so, "particularly at Christmas, for you can laugh as you like, that is the correct time to see a ghost. "
So begins Marjorie Bowen's story, The Crown Derby Plate, which is guarenteed to send shivers down your spine. Martha Pym is right, Christmas is the time to curl up by the fire with a collection of stories designed to make your flesh creep.
Some are new stories. specially commissioned for this volume, such as Basil Copper's chilling, Wish You Were Here, in which the postman delivers messages from beyond the grave.
The author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, contributes The Night Before Christmas, a powerful tale not to he read by those of a nervous disposition.
Others are by firm favourites such as Nigel Kneale, author of the classic, Quatermass. His story, The Stocking, tells of a Christmas visit from the furry, green-eyed, slithery, Minkeys.
W. W. Jacobs, the master of the hair-raising short story, is represented by Jerry Bundler, one of his most compelling tales of terror.
From another time and another place comes Sabine Baring Gould's Mustapha, set in Egypt, which tells of a man tricked into damnation.
A wide range of stories are included in Horror For Christmas from the cosily creepy to the truly horrific to make a treat for Christmas no-one will want to miss.

F. McDermott - The Spider : ( London Mystery Magazine #12, Oct. 1951). Lostwannock, Cornwall. A lonesome traveller, lost in a snow storm on Christmas eve, is taken in by a Good Samaritan who offers him food, shelter and drugged port. The frail, aged host opens up about his blindness, the legacy of five years captivity by the Jivaro Indians, as is his morbid obsession with head-shrinking techniques ....

Nigel Kneale - The Stocking: (Tomato Cain, 1949). Left home alone on Christmas eve a five year old is set upon by vicious "Minkeys" who use the stocking father nailed above his cot as a creeper.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Christmas Eve: Reads like a The Monster Club out-take: perhaps my least favourite of his The Night Ghouls stories.

F. S. Smythe - The Sinister Inn: ( Chambers’s Journal, Christmas 1931). "You have heard of cretinism, messieurs?" Caught in a blizzard during their annual cross country Alpine ski tour on Christmas Eve, narrator and the Doctor demand a room from Henri, the hostile innkeeper and his terrified wife, Marie. They're not usually this inhospitable, it's just their killer son has escape from the asylum ...

[Shrink Proof]

We've not yet had the Summer Solstice but I see that the so-called "run-up to Xmas" has started already. A sign of the times we live in (shakes head, sighs, trudges off to the whisky cabinet...).

[dem bones]

Jun 18, 2017 19:34:14 GMT Shrink Proof said:

We've not yet had the Summer Solstice but I see that the so-called "run-up to Xmas" has started already.

Only 184 days to do until the big one!

Basil Cooper - Wish You Were Here: Supernatural horror novella. When Mrs Olive Hollamby disappears from Hoddesden Old Hall in baffling circumstances, her grasping nephew Edward Tovey wastes no time in laying claim to the estate. On Tovey's bizarre death - he fell through rotten boarding over a disused well - the property passes to Mrs. Hollamby's last known relative, John Wilson, author. Hoddesden Old Hall is a sprawling country estate in urgent need of renovation so John, his fiancée Deirdre and mutual friend Barry Clissold, the departmental head of a London museum, set to work in the autumn with a view to completing a major overhaul early in the new year.

Almost as soon as John arrives from London, he receives the first of the musty-smelling, vintage postcards advising him that the sender is "coming closer all the time" and looking forward to paying him a visit at Christmas. As the winter fast approaches, so the sender ups their game until barely a few days go by without John receiving another vaguely intimidating communique. Is this some fool's idea of a joke? Lots of to-ing and fro-ing to rectory and library to interview Rev. Roger Anstey and Dr. Arnold Broadbent, local historian, but ultimately, December 24th is upon John, Dierdre and Barry and still no clue as to who is threatening to join them for the festivities, although local gossip has it that Tovey murdered his aunt and dumped her corpse down the now sealed well. A bastard power cut sends Deirdre and Barry battling through the snow to fetch candles from the village shop, leaving John home alone to await his Santa Claus ....

Mr. Copper stretches the flimsiest of plots to 70+ pages but scores with a dramatic and properly downright creepy climax in the attic.

S. Baring Gould - Mustapha: Mustapha, a camp hanger-on at Luxor's Hotel de L'Europe, turns his back on Allah, preferring to party with the Brits. But then he falls for the daughter of Ibraim, the most devout worshipper at the mosque, who refuses to sanction marriage unless Mustapha returns to the faith. He does, vowing to cut his own throat should another drop of alcohol pass his lips. All is well until Jameson, a despicable, whining English racist, plays a cruel trick involving a plum pudding.

[dem bones]

Stephen Gallagher – To Dance By the Light of the Moon: ".... a nineteen-year-old girl, student at the Poly, fan of Bronski Beat and Spandau Ballet, smashed over the head with a length of railing and her already-dead body dragged to a sidestreet to be stripped, stabbed and slashed twenty-three times, and then partly redressed and covered over with her own coat ...."

New Years Eve. While sleazy Don the all-night DJ entertains a tribe of under-age groupies in the studio, Mercedes Medina, newsreader, is stalked around the radio station by a body-hopping entity with a lust for murder. From the first we sense that this is not going to end well for anyone.